Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine

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. The following is a conversation with Mohammed 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'll 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 former one, that is truly the most challenging in conversations and in life, but to me, it is the only way. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mohammed el-Kurd.

Tell me about Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood in East Jerusalem where you grew up. Sheikh Jarrah has, 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 Nakba 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. My grandmother moved to 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 Jordinian government, which had control over that part of Jerusalem at the time. And then people lived there harmoniously. They were all from different parts of Palestine, and they managed to rebuild their lives after the first expulsion.

Do you have hate in your heart for Israel? Why does that matter?

If we could 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 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 well with me. I think it's completely unfortunate and wrong that Jewish people have been persecuted across history.

What are the top obstacles to peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians? The occupation comes to mind. The [inaudible 00:48:23] policies come to mind. The seeds comes to mind. The asymmetry of the judiciary comes to mind. The whole system needs to be dismantled. I will quote my dear friend Robert Barre, who's a lawyer who says, "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. That's quite simple.

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.

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 weapon 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 unprovoked Hamas is firing rockets unto Israel, regards to what I think of Hamas, obviously, but unprovoked. But that's not the case. The propagation 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.

Well, if we look a little bit more short term, people speak about a one state solution, 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 for Palestine and Israel? Do you see a one state solution where there is a diversity of different peoples like in the United States and they have equal rights in the courts and everywhere else?

What's your vision? Let's just take it as a microcosm of Jerusalem, what's your vision for Jerusalem look like with a peaceful coexistence of people? As it looked like before the Israeli State emerged. I mean, we should be reading our history here. When you read European and white historians, they'll tell you Palestine was there, and many of them would say it was even without a people, nobody was there, or some of them will say we we're uncivilized. But the fact of the matter is Palestine, Jerusalem particularly, had a diversity of religion, Druze, Jewish people.

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. It's all a negative role, to be honest.

You've tweeted that 49 years ago, Ghassan Kanafani... Well, you can maybe correct me on the pronunciation, was assassinated. You wrote, "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 principle 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?

To ask another silly question, since you mentioned the United States, I don't know if you follow the politics in the United States, but do you have a preference of Presidential candidates in the 2024 election? I do follow.

You wrote Rifqa, a book of poetry. How did that come about? Maybe you can tell the story of that book coming to be. I signed the book when I had a lot less visibility in the world. 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's starts in Jerusalem, it goes to Atlanta, it goes back to Jerusalem, and then it ends in New York. Rifqa is the name of my grandmother and it's an Arabic name, a Hebrew name, and it means to accompany someone. 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 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 as a poet, as a writer, you've written a book of poetry and now working on a new book. What can you say about your process of crafting words? I think people listening to this can hear that there's a poetry to 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? It's a lot more neat than this conversation. I am obsessed with sentences and it takes me a long time to finish a piece of writing. I am a perfectionist.

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 endlessly. Everything comes to an end. There's not necessarily a perfect resolution for everything, but nothing continues in the form that it started in, and the occupation and colonialism and Palestine and Zionism, all of these things, are not at all sustainable whatsoever taking a look at history. A lot of what I'm saying today and what I have said in your podcast, many people would've would be pearl-clutching hearing me say what I say. But I always try to remind myself that during Jim Crow, during slavery, during the Holocaust, during the occupation of Algeria, during any point of colonialism in the African continent, 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 inevitability of justice.