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
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, who were chased away from their homes in the camp in Jenin, were some of the same people who were chased away from their 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 48, 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.
I mean, I think the Washington Post article is a little bit more careful than other media that came out recently about Janine. 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 Janine is under occupation by the... by the Israeli forces, by the Israeli regime.
I think this is the most important piece of context that gets up secured 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 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. 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 at the end of the day, it's not even about courage. It's about survival. They don't do this because of machismo or because of heroic tendencies. It's because this is about survival.
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think 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.
Yeah, I mean, 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 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 I 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 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.
Well, the framing makes it seem as though unprovoked Hamas is 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.
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