A Palestinian you should know:Mohammed El- Kurd
Writer & Speaker
Palestine in America (PiA): What balad(s) is your family from?
Mohammed El-Kurd (ME): Jerusalem. My father’s from Sheikh Jarrah, and my mother is from Jabal El Mukabbir. My grandmother was born in Jerusalem but was dispossessed from her Haifa home during the Nakba.
PiA: Was there a moment(s) that drove you to begin your career?
ME: I grew up in occupied Jerusalem, and politics were a doorbell away from handing you a legalized order of ethnic cleansing. A settler organization forcibly took over half of my home; many friends’ homes were demolished, family members were imprisoned, and so on. Politics were the norm. I began writing to humanize “the Palestinians.” Now, understanding the racism and the statelessness of that sentence, I moved beyond that approach. When my approach shifted from “I am wounded” to “an entity wounded me and many others, this is how you can stop it,” I had more words. I wrote what I saw without sanitization.
Such sanitization and erasure exist systemically, so when Israeli authorities steal Palestinian homes, it’s legally an eviction and reported as such. Journalists fail to report the Israeli judicial system’s staggering asymmetry and clear colonialist goals. They don’t know that we’re arguing against settlements in settler courts. So, for now, this is why I choose to write in the public sphere because the general narrative of occupied Palestine is skewed and diluted.
So infiltration of the public domain is necessary to shape opinion. In terms of advocacy, we are at war with a calculated and goal-oriented Israeli propaganda machine. Most Palestinians are destabilized and censored to build a matching infrastructure. Of course, that said, many Palestinians are speaking with unflinching truth about Palestine, and we should echo them. Zionists have a narrative, we have to debunk it.
PiA: What is your earliest memory of participating in political work?
ME: There was a cop named Munir that my neighborhood collectively hated for his brutality on one end and betrayal on the other, as he was Arab. I was 8 or so when I decided to write him a “diss poem,” calling him a hound dog from hell. I stuttered as I read it aloud during one of our Friday protests against dispossession and settlements in Sheikh Jarrah, and it was music to everyone's ears. I still laugh when I think about it.
PiA: How has/does Palestine play a role in your work?
ME: Palestine is constant and inevitable in my work. A nagging refrain. It is in every talking point, every poem, every punchline. The challenge is allowing Palestine the luxury of specificity necessary for complex, well-written stories. Meaning, I try to write about real people and communities dealing with interpersonal struggles as well as political. These struggles always reverberate the larger context of Israeli violence in Palestine. It’s hard to be Palestinian and not talk about Palestine. Wounds hurt, and numbness is temporary.
PiA: What’s a Palestinian adverb/quote/person/poem/song that you often reflect on in this work?
ME: One of my favorite poems, and the philosophical backbone to my poetry, is Rashid Hussien’s “God is a Refugee.” He wrote this sardonic poem following the 1944 implementation of the Absentees Property Law, which allowed the Israeli authorities to seize Palestinian lands and homes after being internally or externally displaced. The Zionist forces in Palestine didn’t stop there, though. They used this form of legalized theft to take over holy sites that the Abrahamic traditions believe belong to God.
God’s now a refugee, sir!
So confiscate even the rugs of the mosque.
Sell the church, it is His property
sell the Imam in the black auction.
Even our orphans, their father is absent
confiscate our orphans then, sir!
By writing “God is a Refugee,” Hussien was able to contextualize this oppressive law and fuel a movement of opposition for it among farmers for whom legal jargon was not accessible. Rim Banna sang this poem and named it “The Absent One.”
PiA: What do you hope to achieve in your line of work?
ME: I’m still learning and understanding what I’m most effective at. Once that I figure that out in a hundred years, I hope to contribute to a vocabulary that challenges the legal, political, and cultural languages that suppress Palestinian history, reality, and demands.
PiA: Many times, Palestinians endure marginalization on all sides of the aisle -- what obstacles do you face/have you faced, and how have you overcome it?
ME: I’m privileged to be given the platform to speak publicly about Palestine, despite the muzzles and inherent power imbalances. But free speech as a privilege and not a right is a problem. Many more Palestinians back home face unarticulated oppression, and they’re seldom allowed to speak about it, sometimes prosecuted if they spell it out with their own terms.
Another challenge: Palestinian and ally voices continue to face baseless accusations of anti-Semitism designed to stifle advocacy work and movement building. Those allegations are dangerous. With Netanyahu accusing the ICC investigation into Israeli war crimes of being “pure anti-Semitism” and the efforts to criminalize something as basic (and necessary) as BDS, I worry for the student activists and organizers who are much less reputable and backed than the ICC.
PiA: What’s your advice to folks looking to deepen their political journeys?
ME: I don’t think I’m quite ready to give advice. Stay stubborn?
PiA: How do you see the Palestinian diaspora intersect with issue-based work amongst other communities?
ME: One of my favorite people, Fayrouz Sharqawi of Grassroots alQuds, says, and I’m paraphrasing here, if you want to liberate Palestinians, you should organize for the liberation of black and indigenous communities in the United States.
Our struggles against settler-colonialism intersect, although some of us can camouflage through color lines. Especially in the United States, we don’t all experience white supremacy to the same degree. However, to answer this question pragmatically, one of the ways this intersection manifests is through police exchange programs between Israel and The United States, like Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) in Atlanta, where Israeli-designed tactics of brutality, over-policing, racial profiling, and mass surveillance are used to terrorize black communities.
PiA: How would you define solidarity?
ME: Angela Davis. Rachel Corrie. Marilyn Buck. But also solidarity can be without hyperbole, as simple as boycotting an Israeli product or cultural event.
I’m still learning the action-rooted ways of being in solidarity with other marginalized groups.
PiA: What do you want people to know about you/your experience as a Palestinian in this work?
ME: I’d like for people to know that my experience’s uniqueness is only in its publicization. Palestinians across historic Palestine have stories similar to mine, often more detrimental and backbreaking. The occupation is in constant, rapid mitosis.
PiA: What does a free world mean to you?
ME: Feasibly speaking, a free world means no prisons, no colonies, no imperialism, and no surveillance.
PiA: Was there a moment that made you consider leaving political work? What was it, and what kept you working in politics?
ME: I think about it often. But the issues I’m fighting hit home, quite literally. If I’m not doing this for myself, who will?
