Dana AlKurd (Dana Al-Kurd) — episode contributor on Palestine
speaker
187 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 11 Jul
Dana AlKurd (Dana Al-Kurd) — episode contributor on Palestine’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
They had been working for over a decade to push back against Qatar's slow drift towards normalizing ties with Israel, which is something the Qatari government had been entertaining, largely under pressure from the United States and from its Gulf neighbors.
And in a country where over 80% of people oppose normalization with Israel, this organization, Qatari Youth, had a base.
But they had to work carefully because you can't have unsanctioned civil society organizations.
There's all sorts of restrictions on independent activism, extremely severe in Lebanon.
But they saw the World Cup as a window, an opportunity to turn what already existed, which was deep, widespread popular solidarity with Palestine, into something visible, coordinated, and impossible to ignore.
So they got to work.
They persuaded Qatar's national team captain to wear a keffiyeh-patterned armband before the opening match.
And then there was this hashtag, the captain's armband is Palestinian, which started trending on Arabic Twitter.
They reached out to Qatari influencers and prominent journalists who amplified the campaign across social media.
And they called on local businesses to display signs that they were compliant with the boycott divestment sanctions movement.
They also ran a kind of counterintelligence operation against Israeli media because they were the ones that began identifying Israeli journalists and their logos on social media, flagging them so that Arab fans at the tournament knew who to avoid.
And this is how those videos of Israeli broadcasters being turned away kept appearing online.
They also organized fans to chant for Palestine at the 48th minute of every match.
That's not random, that's a reference to 1948 and to the Nakba, where close to a million Palestinians were expelled from their homes with the founding of the Israeli state.
Key members of Qatari youth said the goal was to turn Arab fans from sympathizers into participants.
And they were honest about something else too.
This only worked because the ground was already ready.
As they put it, the campaign would not have succeeded had it not been for people's own proactive support of the Palestinian cause.
And that's worth sitting with for a moment.
The organizing mattered, the strategy mattered, but the reason it spread so quickly, so far, is that there was already a fire there.
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