Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine | Lex Fridman Podcast #391

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. That's 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 of movement, which is what's happening in Gaza, which is blockaded the water, air and land and is deemed uninhabitable by human rights organizations like the un. No one has a right to do that.

The following is a conversation with Mohamed El Kurd, a world renowned Palestinian poet, writer, journalist and an influential voice speaking out and fighting for the Palestinian cause. He provides a very different perspective on Israel and Palestine than my previous two episodes with Benjamin Netanyahu and Yuval Noah Harari. I hope his story and his words add to your understanding of this part of the world as it did to mine. I will continue to have difficult long form conversations such as these, always with empathy and humility, but with backbone. And please allow me to briefly comment about criticisms I receive of who I am as an interviewer and a human being. I am not afraid to travel anywhere or challenge anyone face to face, even if it puts my life in danger. But I'm also not afraid to be vulnerable, to truly listen, to empathize, to walk a mile in the well worn shoes of those very different from me. It's this latter task, not the formal one, that is truly the most challenging in conversations and in life. But to me, it is the only way. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and now, dear friends, here's Muhammad Al Kard. Tell me about Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood in East Jerusalem where you grew up.

Sokh Zarah is, you know, in a way, a typical neighborhood, despite the absurd reality that surrounds it. It's a typical neighborhood in terms of Palestinian neighborhoods. It's one that is threatened with colonialism, with settler expansion and with forced expulsion, and it has been that way since the early 70s. My family, like all of the other families in Suzarah, were expelled from their homes in the Nakba in 1948 and they were forced out by the Haganah and other Zionist paramilitaries that later formed the Israeli military and they were driven to various cities. And my grandmother moved from city to city and she ended up in zhug Zarah in 1956, was established as refugee housing unit by the United nations and by the Jordanian government, which had control over that part of Jerusalem at the. At the time. And then people lived there harmoniously. They were all from different parts of Palestine. And, you know, they managed to rebuild their lives after the first expulsion. And then in the 70s, you had settler organizations, many of whom were registered here in New York and in the United States, claiming our houses and our lands as their own by divine decree. And because, obviously, because the judges are Israeli and the laws were written by Israeli settlers and the whole judiciary was established atop the rubble of our homes and villages. We had no, you know, we had no real pull in the courts. The Israeli courts would look at the Israeli documents which we argue are falsified and fabricated, and they would take them at face value without authentication. And they refuse to look at our documents, refuse to look at the documents from the Jordanian government, the documents from the un, the documents from the Ottoman archives. So you already have this kind of asymmetry in the court that for any person with common sense, would lead you to believe that this is not, in fact a legal battle or a real estate dispute, as the Israeli Ministry of Foreign affairs likes to frame it, but rather a very, very political b. One that is about social engineering, one is about demographics, one that is about removing as many Palestinians as possible from occupied Jerusalem. So we did what all Palestinian families in Jerusalem do when they're faced with this kind of threat. And we bought time. We pleaded and pleaded and appealed the courts and appealed the cases, and we got over 50 expulsion orders. In 2009, rifle wielding settlers accompanied by police and Israeli military came over and shoved our neighbors outside of their home around 5am it's like it was the most brutal, violent thing I'd seen as a child at the time. And I didn't realize that my turn was coming. My turn was next. They threw them out in the middle of the night with sound bombs and rubber bullets. And they had to live in tents on the street for many, many months, and even lived in our front yards for a few months and lived in their cars.

Can you linger on that process? 2009, you said 50 expulsion orders. What, what was happening?

Between the 70s and 2009, there had been many dozens of expulsions. Orders against us and against many other families in the. In the neighborhood. 28 other families. 20. 28 families in total, actually. And in 2008, 2009, the first wave of expulsions finally happened. It actually began with Umm Kamil Al Kurd. We're not related, but we live on the same street in the same neighborhood. She was thrown out of her home. Her husband, an elderly man, also named Muhammad Al Kurd, was pronounced dead on the spot. He had a stroke and died. The Israeli soldiers pulled him out of his home while he was urinating and threw him into the streets, and he died a few months later. The Ghawi and the Hanun families, which are, you know, kind of not a clan, but, you know, in Palestine you have sometimes a building that contains multiple brothers and their wives each have little apartments. So the Rawi and Hanun family is. About 35 people were thrown out in the middle of the street right across from us. And then by the end of 2009, I had come home from school to find all of my furniture scattered across the length of the street. And I saw the settlers, many of whom had American accents, living in our house. And their justification for this, their reasoning for this is, you know, divine decree. This is. This is what God wants. This is the promised land. This is so and so as if God is some kind of real estate agent. So they took over half of our home. And we continue to be in courts for the following decade. This was. I was still a child, and I had broken English, and I was talking to all of these diplomats and all of these journalists who would, you know, subjugate me to their Subject me to their, you know, racism and biases and. And so on and so forth. And I had to prove my humanity time and time again. And I had to, you know, do all of this, all with broken English. And we were lucky. Even if we got a. If we got a quote in the. In the article written about us by the Times or so on and so forth, move forward to 2020. I was in New York City studying a master's degree, getting a master's degree. And my father calls me and he tells me, we have yet another expulsion order. And we decided to launch a campaign. It was quite ambitious at the time, but the whole objective of the campaign was to demystify what is happening, because it's reported on in the news, it's reported on around the world as this real estate dispute, as these evictions, which was not really what's happening. Evictions do not entail a foreign army in an occupied territory forcibly removing you out of your home. So I came home from New York and we launched a campaign which turned into a global success. And I believe it was a global success, because finally, the images on the screen matched the rhetoric that was being said. It wasn't so confusing or complicated anymore. All of this asymmetry was pronounced and articulated in a way that any viewer, be it in Alabama, be it in New York, be it in Egypt, was able to understand the asymmetry of the judicial system and the agenda of colonialism that was taking place here. And due to immense international and diplomatic pressure from all over the world, even the United States, the Israeli Supreme Court was forced to cancel all of the eviction orders in Sheikh Jarrah until further notice. This, I consider, was a small victory because obviously we are still at risk of losing our homes once they decide to do the land registry, which we can get into a little bit later if you'd like. But nonetheless, it was something that we haven't seen before. And the fact that the Supreme Court canceled all of these dozens and dozens of past eviction orders, it set a precedent. And it also proved that this was a political battle, not a legal one.

So let's just add a little more detail to the people who are not familiar with the story, with the region, with the evictions, with the courts. So, first of all, Sheikh Jarrah is in East Jerusalem. Maybe you can say, what is Jerusalem? Where is it located? What are we talking about in terms of regionally? And second, what kind of people live there? So if you could talk about the Palestinian people. And we should also make clear that these evictions is literally people living in homes and their homes are taken away from them. I suppose technically it's legal evictions. But you're saying that there's asymmetry of power in the courts, where the legal is not so much legal, but is politically and maybe even religiously based.

Yeah, I mean, the biggest. The most important context here is that oftentimes Americans think that Israel and Palestine are some kind of two neighboring countries that live next to each other and they are at war. But the fact of the matter is, Palestinian cities exist all over the country, and it's just one country. It's just one infrastructure. And Israel is literally on top of Palestine. It was established on top of our villages in the late 40s. Now, according to international law, the eastern part of Jerusalem is under occupation. So Israeli presence and jurisdiction over the area is completely illegitimate. They say the evictions are legal because the settlers write their laws. So obviously they're going to allow settlements to expand. But according to international law, according to even US Policy, Israel occupies the Eastern part of Jerusalem, its jurisdiction there is illegitimate. We shouldn't even be going to their courts in the first place. But we have no other option. We're talking, when we're talking about. We're talking about Jerusalem, we're talking about generations and generations and generations of people who have lived there for the longest time, who now, even though, you know, for example, me, I don't have a citizenship, I'm a resident, a mere resident. I have a blue ID card, even though my grandmother and my grandfather were born in Jerusalem, their grandparents were born in Jerusalem, even though we've lived there for generations. But Palestinians in Jerusalem, we are not citizens. We're just mere residents. Same thing with residents of the occupied Syria and Golan. They are not citizens. They are just residents in their own hometowns. This is an important piece. But all of this gets convoluted and lost in translation. And I think, I would argue it's a lot more. It's a lot of the time, it's dubious. It's malicious, the fact that these little pieces of context that frame the entire story get lost. You know, I'll talk to you about something else. Just 10 minutes across from my neighborhood, there's another neighborhood called Silwan. And the people in Silwan are also threatened with expulsion, but not through evictions, but through home demolitions. And if you look at American media or Israeli state media, you would read the headlines. You know, Palestinians living in homes built illegally are going to face, you know, their homes as they're going to be torn apart. What these headlines don't tell you, and even sometimes most of the time, the substance doesn't tell you that Palestinians seldom ever get building permit applications. In fact, recently a spokesperson for the Israeli military confirmed that was 95% of building permits applications submitted by Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the west bank are rejected by the Israeli authorities. And to make this even more absurd, the guy, the councilman who is responsible for rejecting and accepting building permit applications, his name is Jonathan Youssef and he's an activist in the settler movements and he's a Jerusalem council member. And he last week, following the expulsion of sub Laban family in the old City of Jerusalem, he posted to his official Facebook account, nakba now. Demanding a second nakba, promising another nakba. He has done so on many occasions. He has chanted with a megaphone just a few months ago, walking down the street in my neighborhood, chanting, we want Nakba now. This is a man who has vandalized our murals, who has screamed islamophobic slurs. This is literally a man in the government making these decisions. Right. And this is similar to, you know, Masefir Yatta in the South Hebron Hills. For those who don't know, it's a place in the occupied west bank where Bedouin and cave dweller Palestinians have lived for generations. They have cultivated the land and recently they were expelled from their homes. Over a thousand people were expelled from their remote small villages. Again, if you're read American media, they would say, it would say Palestinians living in firing zones were removed because they're living in a military zone. What? These media reports will not tell you that in the 80s, the Israeli government purposefully classified many lands in the occupied west bank as firing zones, as off limit military zones for the sole purpose of expelling the residents. And this is not some kind of conspiracy theory. This is declassified information that was released from the Israeli state archive that was later reported on Baha audits. Also, these reports will not tell you that the judge who rules on whether these people continue to live under homes or not is himself a settler in the West Bank. And I'm not even talking about, you know, a loose definition of a settler, but according to international law, this is a settler living illegally in an illegal settlement in the occupied West Bank. This is the judiciary that we deal with. Which is hilarious considering how it's being reported on in American media recently as some kind of beacon of progress and democracy that the new government is trying to undermine.

So there's no representation in the courts for the Palestinian people?

I mean, we have lawyers, but no, there's no, there's no. In fact there is. For Palestinians with Israeli citizenships, for example, there's over 60 laws that specifically and explicitly discriminates against them.

So again, it's technically legal. The evictions and the demolitions.

Yeah. So was Jim Crow was legal also?

You know, when something is legal, it can also still be wrong.

Absolutely. History has shown us time and time again that legality does not necessarily mean morality. And the law, you know, is. The law is a bloodbath in many ways. It has been used and abused to facilitate the most horrendous atrocities. And in the case of the Palestinians, the law has served to facilitate and bureaucratize our ethnic cleansing.

Do you think there's people, judges and just people in power in the judiciary that have hate for the Palestinian people?

I mean, I'm not really Yanni, the easy simplistic answer is yes, but I don't really care about the contents of their hearts. What I care about the policy they enact. Right. The laws they write and enact are hateful. Demolishing a person's home so you can have somebody from Long Island, New York who's fleeing fraud charges. This is the case in my house, live in, in their, in their, you know, front yard, that's hateful. So I don't need, you know, confirmation. This is something we see a lot actually. You know, Palestinians and people who are pro Palestine and just people who want to make a difference in how this cause is represented. We often run for the first opportunity to cite an Israeli being hateful. You know, the recent, the last Israeli prime minister said that he has killed many Arabs and that he has no qualms with it. Netanyahu has said a slew of racist, hateful things. Jabotinsky, the pioneer of Zionism, Herzl, one of the pioneers of Zionism, all have said horrible, hateful things. We also cannot wait to cite a confession from a former Israeli soldier whose guilty conscience is keeping them, you know, up at night. And we use all of these, you know, confessions or slip ups as evidence to prove that this is a racist country that is enacting racist acts. But we don't need this because the material proof is on the ground. You see it in the policies that are enacted. You see it in how the country, how this regime has behaved for the past 75 years. I don't need, you know, confessions from the likes of Netanyahu to understand that his heart is full of hate.

So if you could return to 1948 and describe something that you've mentioned, the Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic. What was this event? What was this displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948?

Well, you know, like May 15, 1948 is commemorated every year as, you know, the anniversary of the Nakabe. But I would even argue, and I think this is like a very popular idea, is that the Nakba did not begin or end in 1948. The 48 was rather, you know, a crystallization of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. And what happened was, is that many Zionists paramilitaries that again today, merged and made the Israeli army, which calls itself the Israeli Defense Forces, even though they're literally always the aggressor, committed atrocities and massacres and, you know, they destroyed over 500 villages. They killed over 15,000 people. They forced a very large portion, a majority of the Palestinian population to flee their homes. And this was, you know, the near total destruction of Palestinian society that continues on to this day. We refer to it as the ongoing nakba. And you see it in Sheikh Jarrah, you see it in Silouan, you see it in Hebron, and all of these people losing their homes and in many cases, time and time again. You know, I grew up and my grandmother told me the stories about the nakabe. She told me stories about her neighbors who were running away in a panic, and they had mistaken a pillow for their offspring, and they just took it with them. And they realized later that they forgot their child and they came back for many, many people who were separated from their. My grandmother herself, she lost her husband for a few months. For nine months, he was imprisoned by the Israelis. You know, she told me all of these stories, and she wasn't just reminiscing about them. She was, you know, letting me know that this is still happening. And I didn't need to grow up that old to see it happening in my own front yard to see that expulsion happen in the same fashion she's talked about it. But, 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. With laws that say, you know, you're not. You're not legally allowed to be here. We're going to kick you out of your home. And it's happening. And it has happened in, in. In broad daylight. One piece of context for the listener who doesn't, who is not familiar with the Nakbeh, 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 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 Zangwal said that this was a country without a people. And Palestinians who have existed there, who have cultivated the lands, who have, you know, 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 Iron Wall. Colonization of Palestine must go forward. And all of these. All of these schools of thoughts were then shopping around for, you know, 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's that, you know, traces the Zionist movement, oftentimes in the Zionist's own words. And so today what we're seeing is a continuation. And you know, people like Jabotinsky who are like profoundly and explicitly racist, who have called for genocide, who have called the Palestinians barbaric, who have said and done racist things. You know, Jabotinsky also was like the founder of the Irgun, one of the other militias that later merged to become the Idea the Israeli army, which was responsible for the Deir Essin 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 still 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.

What do you say to people that describe Israel as having a historical right to the land? So if you stretch not across decades, but across centuries into the past, 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. You know, a lot of the time people cite the Torah and cite religious books and you know, 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. That's. 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, of movement, which is what's happening in Gaza, which is blockaded to water, air and land and is deemed uninhabitable by human rights organizations like the un. No one has a right to do that.

Do you have hate in your heart for Israel?

Why does that matter.

As one human being to another. You're describing quite brilliantly that the contents of people's hearts don't matter as much as the policies and the context of the courts and the laws and what actually is going on on the streets in terms of actions. But this is also a human story.

Yeah.

And I feel like at the core of the situation here is hate or maybe inability for some group of humans to see the humanity in another group of humans. And so it's important here to talk about the contents of hearts. If we were to think about the long term future of this.

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. They cannot breathe. They cannot live. They are living under excruciating circumstances. You know, Palestinians, you know, I don't know, I don't know how many Palestinians have interacted with. But we are some of the most wonderful people. I mean, not all of us, I think some of us are, you know, insufferable. But most of us, you know, most of us, you know, we're very, very hospitable. We're very hospitable. Even like in the early, early correspondence between the mayor of Jerusalem and Herzl, who wrote the Jewish State, you know, 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, you know, heart wrenching. But I, I personally think there is, there's a lot of dignity in negating your oppressor. And I think it would be ridiculous today, today, if we like, look back at Jim Crow, for example, and we asked the person who's lived under, 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.

In Rivka, you wrote, my father told me, anger is a luxury we cannot afford. Be composed, calm, still laugh when they ask you, smile when they talk. Answer them, educate them. So let me linger on this. Is there anger in there, in your heart? And does it cloud your judgment?

Does it cloud my judgment? I don't think so. I think we've. 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 to 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, 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. And so we resort to sending our kids who will not threaten and who will not, you know, trigger the biases they have against Muslims and Arab people, which Palestinians, even though we're not all Muslim, are racialized as Muslim. And this is why we emphasize the deaths of women and children as though the deaths of our men does not count or does not matter. All of these things. I think the new generation of Palestinians is rebelling against, I think words like, you know, I think it's loaded. It's loaded language, anger and angry and hate and so on and so forth because it mischaracterizes people and it kind of delegitimizes them a little bit. You know, I think the real anger is the bulldozer bulldozing through my house. I think the real anger is the 18 year old soldier who refuses to see me as a human being and strip searches me every chance they get. That's where the real anger lies. And I'm quite honestly proud of, you know, our unabashedness and our refusal to like bow our heads or bury our heads in the sand. I think that's the only way forward.

So anger, or whatever it is, is a fuel for action.

Absolutely. And it has been throughout, throughout history.

It has been how much of this tension is religious in the practical aspects of the courts and the, the evictions and the demolitions. And you mentioned something divine decree. How much underneath it do you feel, the division over religious texts and religious beliefs?

You know, it's convenient to market what's happening in Palestine as a religious conflict because it allows the listener the luxury of believing that this is an ancient, complicated thing that stretches thousands and thousands of years ago. But the fact of the matter is the people who invented Zionism, who pioneered the Zionist movement, who called for emigration and settling into Palestine, a lot of them were atheists, a lot of them were not religious at all. And the leaders of the Israeli state today, a lot of them are atheists and a lot of them are secular and so on and so forth. It's easy to say that this is, you know, about Muslims and Jews fighting over the land and so on and so forth, but it's not. It's about the land itself and it's about people being forced out of their homes.

Benjamin Netanyahu said anti Zionism is anti Semitism.

Of course he said that.

Do you disagree?

Absolutely, I disagree.

What's the gap between anti Zionism and anti Semitism? Those who are against the policies of Israel versus those who are against the Jewish people.

I watched the. Well, the first, like 20 minutes, and then I couldn't do it anymore, you know, but I watched. And then what was interesting about Netanyahu is that he said, you know, being. Being anti Zionist is like saying, I'm okay with the Jews. I just don't believe the Jews have a right to form their own state. That's like saying, I'm okay with Americans. I'm just not okay with Americans having their own state. And there is so much wrong with that statement in the sense that Jewish people are a religious group and Americans, and to be. Being an American is a nationality that consists of a diversity of religions and. And so on and so forth. First of all, and the second, the second thing that's wrong with that statement is the whole idea that states somehow have a right to exist or whatever. It's such a distraction. You have people getting shot in the street. You have millions and millions of people besieged. You have people losing their homes. You have people who are held in Israeli prisons without trial or charge indefinitely. But the conversations that are being held on the Hill, the conversations that are being held on cnn are does Israel has a right to exist? Or why would you negate Israel as having a right to exist? That's one. Now, of course, I just find it's ridiculous again that opposing a secular political movement that was explicitly colonialist, expansionist, exclusive, and racist through the words of its own authors is somehow and also, again, opposing such a political movement that is quite young and quite recent is somehow equivalent to opposing a religion that is thousands and thousands of years old. But it is convenient, again, for Israeli politicians to frame us who oppose Zionism, a form of Racism and bigotry as anti Semites. But I can guarantee you Benjamin Netanyahu has no problem with antisemitism. This is the same man who has no problem getting on stage and shaking hands with Pastor John Hagee. Doing web webinars with Pastor John Hagee. For those who don't know, Pastor John Hagee is the founder of Christians United for Israel, who has said on multiple occasions that Hitler was a hunter, who. Who was sent to hunt the Jews, who said on multiple occasions that Jewish people are going to perish in hell. You can. All of this is like, verifiable by Google. And this is one of the Israeli regime's closest allies, right? So the Israeli regime does not have a problem with anti Semites. When it serves its interest, it has a problem. I mean, like, if you look at evangelicals or like Christian Zionism at large, anti Semitism lies at the heart of Christian Zionism. It's the idea that we want to drive all of the Jews outside of the United States so that Armageddon could happen or whatever the fuck. This accusation has been a muzzle. It has been used as a muzzle to silence political opposition and to stifle political advocacy for the liberation of Palestine. And a lot of the time people get caught up in denouncing it and in justifying themselves and disclaimers and so on and so forth that you lose the point that you're distracted from the focal point. That is, there is an ongoing colonialism happening where people every single day are killed. I cannot keep count. This morning a kid was shot in Palestine. We cannot. It's embarrassing even for me that I don't even know the numbers here. But this muzzle has been effective. And I think the only righteous option is to oppose these labels, these smear campaigns that target us. I myself have been labeled an anti Semite by the adl. And I mean, like, if you want to talk about that at surface level, people will say, like, wow, the ADL Anti Defamation League, you know, condemned you. But people do not look at the history of the Anti Defamation League. Do not look at the present of the Anti Defamation League. The fact that they are the largest non governmental police training department in the country where they train police in racial profiling and militarism. The fact that they have historically and continue to have engaged in surveillance on black liberation movements, on anti apartheid South African activists. Most recently in Charlottesville, when white supremacists were marching and chanting anti Semitic, the ADL advised local police departments to spy on the black organizers opposing the white supremacists this is again, all verifiable on the Internet.

Go to droptheadl.org so the ADL does not alleviate the. The hate in the world as it probably is designed to do?

No, it's, it's the guys. I don't think the Apartheid Defense League is really our most progressive.

That's what it stands for.

Yeah. In case you didn't know. Now you know.

If we can just linger on this idea of anti Semitism, there's quite a bit of anti Muslim sentiment in the United states, especially after 9 11. I've spoken to people about that. There's also anti Jewish anti Semitism sentiment in the United States, but also throughout human history. What do you make about this kind of fact of human nature that people seem to hate Jews throughout history, especially in the 20th century, especially with Nazi Germany. What are your in general thoughts about the hatred of the Jewish people?

I mean, I think it's obviously wrong. I don't know. It's. It's this. It's this idea that I even have to clarify what I think about anti Semitism that doesn't sit right well with me. I think it's completely unfortunate and wrong that Jewish people have been persecuted across history.

So one of the criticisms, I think I read the ADL making this criticism of you is maybe you've tweeted a comparison between Israel and Hitler and thereby diminishing the evil that is Hitler. What would you say to that?

Amy Cesaire talks about this a lot. The exceptionalization of Hitler. Hitler is a deplorable, I don't know, condemnable, you know, rotten, racist, horrible human being that belongs in the depths of hell. Obviously, that's. That goes without without saying, but I am allowed analogy, and I'm allowed to say whatever I want. Now, I don't necessarily think that, that such an analogy is a good strategy to have, but at the time, the context came in 2021, when Israeli soldiers and policemen and settlers were literally burning down our neighborhood. Again, verifiable by Google. And I tweeted it. And also I remember I tweeted something. I hope every single one of them dies. And to this day, there's some kind of, you know, gotcha for me. As if I should have tweeted like, oh, here's the apple pie for every single soldier that's throwing tear gas in my house. You know, there is, there is such an exceptionalism when it comes to Palestinians. We're not allowed analogy. We're not allowed expression. We're not allowed armed Resistance. We're not allowed peaceful resistance. We're not allowed to boycott because that's anti Semitic. We're not allowed to do anything. So what are we allowed if I, If I can't boycott, and that's against American law now, to boycott, and if I can't pick up a rifle because that's against the law, and if I can't even tweet my frustration out, what am I allowed to do? Yeah, maybe Netanyahu can send me a manual he's happy with, you know.

So you've spoken about the taking of homes, the idea of killing civilians, killing children. What about the violence going the other direction? Israelis being killed in part by terrorist action?

Well, it depends on. Depends on how you define terrorism. Right across history, one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. I don't necessarily subscribe to the definition of terrorism. If, If a foreign army is in my neighborhood, which it's not supposed to be, and they're shooting live ammunition at my house, I'm allowed to do what I'm allowed to do. And again, this is another. Yet another case of Palestinian exceptionalism. Because when it comes to Ukraine, people have no problem seeing Ukrainians defending their homes, seeing Ukrainians dying ferment, seeing Ukrainians making makeshift Molotovs. On Sky News, you know, Sky News was running Molotov making cocktails. The New York Times ran an article interviewing a Ukrainian psychologist who said that hatred, I'm paraphrasing, but he said hatred for all Russians is actually a healthy outlet. The New York Post ran a headline, champion championing, quote, unquote, heroic Ukrainian suicide bomber. These things we would not even dream of. As Palestinians, we are told to turn the other cheek. Time and time again, we're told that we should continue living inside these enclaves without access to clean water, without access to the right to movement, without access to building permits, without our natural right to expansion, without a guarantee that if we leave our house, we're not going to be sought and we're supposed to not do anything about it. That is absurd. Any, Any. Any person watching this understands this completely. People understand, you know, people understand that if somebody is attacking your home, you fight back. If somebody is attacking your family, you fight back. That is, that is not. But again, who gets to call who a terrorist? Who gets to. To define terrorism? This is all about who has power, who gets to write these laws, who gets to write these definitions. You know, why is it. Why is it that American actions in Iraq is not called terrorism by American politicians? Why is you know, violence is like this mutating, mutating concept, you know, and it takes on many shapes and forms. And if it's in a uniform, it's. If it speaks in English, if it has blonde hair, it's somehow acceptable. It's okay. We make movies about it, you know, we sell out tickets about it, we make games about it. But if it's without a uniform, it's. If it has a thick accent, if it has a beard, you know, that's. That's condemnable. That's wrong. That's terrorism, you know.

Do you think violence is an effective method of protest and resistance in general?

In general, I think it has been, but I think, you know, I believe in fighting on all fronts. I don't think violence alone is going to bring about change. I think there's so much to do in culture and shifting public opinion. There's so much to do in media and fighting back against media erasure and censorship. There's so much to do diplomatically and politically. And I think I would be naive if one side has makeshift weapons and the other side is one of the most sophisticated armies in the world. So I don't know. I don't know how effective violence could be in this case.

But if you look at the flip side, do you see the power of nonviolent resistance? So Martin Luther King, Gandhi, the power of turning the other cheek. He spoke negatively about turning the other cheek.

Yeah.

So I sense that doing so has not been effective for the Palestinian people.

We've turned the other cheek generation after generation. There is this Zionist trope that is used against us. They say Palestinian rejectionism. They say that we reject everything. But if you look at the history, our leadership, the Palestinian Authority, has given up inch after inch, has compromised on acre after acre, has signed deal after deal after deal after deal, and still there is no peace. So turning the other cheek is not the most effective method in my book.

What are the top obstacles to peaceful coexistence of Israelis and Palestinians?

The occupation comes to mind. The shoot 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 Ghbariyeh, 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.

Can you describe recognition, redistribution, return and redistribution?

Right of return, the right of return to all of the Palestinian refugees to their homes. When I'm driving around Haifa and I see my grandmother's home that's now turned into a restaurant, I could have, you know, I, I made a joke in one of my essays recently that had I had, that I could have had it all. You know, the beachfront views, her smug attitude. You know, she grew up by the, she grew up by the sea after she relocated to Haifa, after, you know, Jerusalem. We want that, we want that. You know, 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 also there needs, you know, in like 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, 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.

You mentioned the wall. Can you describe the wall?

The wall is a 9 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 the wall that literally has stolen thousands of dunhams 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 travel, he can enter the west bank, he can do a lot more, he's a citizen, he can vote if he wants to. Not that we want to. You know, I always tease my friends, oh, you can go to Italy without a visa because you have an Israeli citizenship. But, you know, they battle national erasure, they battle crime in their own communities because of police negligence. They battle land confiscation and have battled land confiscations in 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. 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. You know, 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 are going to continue fighting, you know, violence, cracking down on refugee camps, bombarding refugee camps is only going to bring about more violence.

So west bank is a large region where a lot of Palestinian people live, and then there's settlements sprinkled throughout. And those settlements have walls around them with security cameras and security guards. Security guards.

There's almost a million settlers in the West Bank.

And so what are the different cities here, if you can mention in the West Bank? In the West Bank, Ramala, Jenin, Bethlehem, Hebron, Jericho, Nablus. They have their own stories, they have their own histories.

Yeah. And it's fascinating also how interconnected they are. You know, like a friend of mine, Muno 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. 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 refugee camps. 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 were chased away from their homes. In the camp in Jenin were some of the same people who were chased away from the 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 Nakbeh. And this is the fact for so many Palestinians, regardless of where they are on the map.

If I may read the description of the situation in Jenin and maybe you can comment. So this is on July 3rd, 4th and 5th. Just reading Washington Post description. So this was an Israeli military incursion to Jenin. The raid included more than 1,000 soldiers backed by drone strikes, making it Israel's largest such operation in the west bank since the end of the second Palestinian uprising in 2005. The Israeli military said it dismantled hundreds of explosives, cleared hundreds of weapons, destroyed underground hideouts, and confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars in terror funds. Many of the 50 Palestinians who have attacked Israelis since the start of the year have come from Jenin camp and the surrounding area. Palestinian attacks inside Israel have killed 24 people this year. UN experts describe the Jenin operation as collective punishment for the Palestinian people, amounting to egregious violations of international law. Many of the more than 150 Palestinians killed by Israelis this year have also come from these communities. Palestinian fighters say they need arms to defend themselves against the Israeli occupation and military incursions into the camp during which Palestinian civilians, including children, have been killed. So those are the. I would say different perspectives on the many people on both sides who have been killed. Many more Palestinians. Can you comment more about the situation?

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, 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 obscured 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 most. 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. You know, these people live in. 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 the 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, you know, of machismo or because of heroic tendencies. It's because this is about survival.

So the degree there's violence, it's about survival.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think if there is no. If there was no occupation, there would be no violence. It's. 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.

Well, the double standard is glaring, but I also think the glorification of violence is questionable. There's a balance to be struck, of course, but.

Yeah, I mean, I don't. What. I don't. I don't think. 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. That's. 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 a 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 he 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 4am 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, 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.

So on July 4th, during this intense period, a Palestinian rammed a car into pedestrians at a bus stop in Tel Aviv, injuring eight people before being shot dead by a passerby. Also that night, Hamas fired rockets into Israel, and then Israel responded with strikes on what it said was an underground weapon site. So just to give some context to the intense violence happening here, what do you think about Hamas firing rockets into Israel?

Well, it's the framing makes it seem as though, like, unprovoked Hamas is like firing rockets onto Israel. Regards to what I 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. They're living in a densely populated enclave that was deemed uninhabitable by the un that was deemed an open air prison. So the rockets in any case, are retaliation for the siege. Let's start there. But again, this is just to prove my point. Violence begets violence. Palestinian people are not violent people. We are.