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
The occupation comes to mind, the political 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 Aghbarieh, 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.
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.
She grew up by the sea after she relocated to Haifa after Jerusalem. We want that. We want that. 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. 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. 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.
The wall is a nine meter high cement wall that was finished in 2003. And if you're American, you've probably heard the whitewashed, 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 a 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... He's a citizen, he can vote if he wants to, not that we want to.
I always tease my friends, you can go to Italy without a visa because you have an Israeli citizenship. But they battle national erasure, they battle crime in their own communities because of police negligence. They battle land confiscation and have battled land confiscation since 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 it 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 2 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 healthcare, 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. It's amazing and impressive that despite these colonial barriers, the real cement ones and the barriers in the mind.
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. Violence, cracking down on refugee camps, bombarding refugee camps is only going to bring about more violence.
And security guards.
There's almost a million settlers in the West Bank.
Yeah. And it's fascinating also how interconnected they are. You know, like a friend of mine, Mona Umari, 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.
Showing 281–300 of 488 · page 15 of 25
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