Mohammed El-Kurd
speaker
488 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2023
last heard 24 May
Mohammed El-Kurd’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 May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
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 gonna 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 is not familiar with the Nakba, is the Balfour Declaration, which was a promise, quote unquote, promise made by the British to the Zionist movement in 1917. committing to the establishment, I'm quoting, I think, word for word, committing to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, as if Palestine was, you know, the British to give away.
And there was this whole movement that called for colonization of Palestine. And there were different 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 had diverse cultural and religious and political practices, they were completely erased.
And other people like Jabotinsky, were a lot more explicit and a lot more honest and said that we need to fight the Palestinians because they love their land, much like the Red Indians love their lands. And he had a paper called The Ironwall Colonization of Palestine Must Go Forward. And all of these schools of thoughts were then shopping around for imperialist support. for their cause.
They tried to get support from the Ottoman Empire. They tried to get support from Germany. And this is in the 1800s. And then they got support from the United Kingdom. A great book to recommend is The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. That traces the Zionist movement, oftentimes in the Zionist's own words. And so today what we're seeing is a continuation.
And people like Jabotinsky who are profoundly and explicitly racist, who have called for genocide, who have called the Palestinians barbaric, who have said and done racist things. Jabotinsky also was 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's 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.
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.
A lot of the time people cite the Torah and cite religious books, and 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 through water, air, and land and is deemed uninhabitable by human rights organizations like the UN. No one has the right to do that.
Why does that matter?
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 I've 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. Most of us, we're very hospitable. We're very hospitable.
Even 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, I 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.
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. You know, I was 14 years old when I first flew to Congress to speak to Congress people and to speak at the European Parliament. And at the time I thought, wow, I must be such a brilliant 14 year old for them to have me here.
And, you know, looking back, I didn't know what I was talking about. I had horrendously broken English. And I didn't have any talking points. And I came to realize that the reason why we send our kids with their PowerPoints to the Hill is because of the racism and the hatred that lingers inside the hearts of American politicians who refuse to sit on the table with Palestinian adults as equals.
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