Mohammed el-Kurd

Mohammed el-Kurd (Arabic: محمد الكرد, born 15 May 1998) is a Palestinian writer and poet, who has gained prominence for his description of Palestinians' lives under occupation in East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank; el-Kurd has referred to evictions as a form of ethnic cleansing,^[1] and has also accused Israel of imposing apartheid-style laws and regulations onto Palestinians in the occupied territories.^[2][3] He has also spoken out about the oppression in the Gaza Strip, notably the Israel–Hamas war.

El-Kurd was born in 1998 in East Jerusalem, the West Bank. Prior to the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, he was pursuing a master's degree in the United States, but returned to protest Israel's eviction of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem (see Sheikh Jarrah controversy).^[4][5]

El-Kurd was born into a family of Palestinian Muslims in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on 15 May 1998. In 2009, part of his family's home in Sheikh Jarrah was seized by Israeli settlers.^[6] He was the main subject of the 2013 documentary film My Neighbourhood by Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi.^[7] He had emigrated to the United States and settled in New York to pursue higher education, but returned to East Jerusalem during the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis.^[4]

Since his return to the Israeli-occupied West Bank amidst the Sheikh Jarrah controversy, El-Kurd has been documenting and speaking out against Palestinian displacement in East Jerusalem.^[8][9][10] He and his twin sister, Muna el-Kurd, began campaigning to raise global awareness on Israeli policies in East Jerusalem through various social media channels.^[11][12] In combination, the twins have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and millions of followers on Instagram. While Muna's posts are usually in Arabic, Mohammed frequently posts in English to cater to a Western audience.^[13]

On 6 June 2021, Mohammed and Muna were both detained by Israel Police;^[14][15] they were later released on the same day after being detained for several hours.^[16] During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, Mohammed appeared on American television channels CNN, MSNBC, and CBSN.^[13]

In 2021, Mohammed and Muna were named on TIME 100 most influential people in the world.^[17][18]

El-Kurd graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in writing, where he created Radical Blankets, an multimedia poetry magazine that won several awards. During his undergraduate studies he performed poetry at campuses and cultural centers across the United States.^[19] He is currently studying for a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from Brooklyn College.^[19]

On 3 August 2023, he was announced to have been employed as the Culture Editor for Mondoweiss, a website which covers the Israel-Palestinian conflict.^[20]

El-Kurd is also a visual artist, printmaker, and fashion designer, having co-designed a collection with Serbian designer Tina Gancev.

Since 2021, el-Kurd has been the Palestine correspondent for The Nation.^[21]

His poetry and articles are in English, written on the themes of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, systemic and structural violence, settler colonialism, Islamophobia, and gender roles.^{[citation needed]}

He has a published volume of poetry, Rifqa.^[19]

El-Kurd cooperated with Palestinian musical artist Clarissa Bitar on a poetry-oud album, Bellydancing On Wounds.^[19]

El-Kurd is noted for "unapologetically" speaking out against Israeli oppression of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, both about the specific, immediate threat to, and constant stress for families like his of eviction but also all forms of oppression.^[22]

El-Kurd blames the "Zionist project" – and multinational political, diplomatic, and economic support for it – for the displacement, subjugation, and statelessness of the Palestinian people,^[22] sometimes mentioning the Palestinians displaced from their homes during the Nakba that started in December 1947, a count he places at 750,000, stating that Zionist militia massacred them and forcibly removed them.^[23]

El-Kurd has stated that characterizing the Israel-Hamas war by that name does not accurately reflect what is happening on the ground because it ignores the antecedents (before October 7, 2023) of the current conflict, such a:^[23]

• the 16-year Israeli and Egyptian land, air, and water Blockade of the Gaza Strip (which El-Kurd calls besieged)
• Israeli control of "every aspect of life in the Gaza Strip", including pharmaceuticals, food, water, travel, and freedom of movement

El-Kurd has spoken of racist remarks by Israeli officials, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, or remarks he even characterizes as "genocidal". El-Kurd states that paying attention to such remarks is "the very answer to everything" in understanding the Gaza situation in 2023–4.^[23]

El-Kurd frequently refers to the – in his opinion, high – numbers of Palestinians killed during the conflict.

El-Kurd has maintained that the October 7 Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel, but also plane hijackings, for example, have received so much attention because Europeans, Israelis, and Americans^[24] perceive Israelis, Europeans, and Americans as "human". By contrast, the Western media conveys to Palestinians that their deaths are simply an everyday occurrence ("quotidian"), i.e. that their deaths are "business as usual". At the same time, Palestinians who speak out against Israeli oppression are labeled antisemitic or hateful, or at best, angry, passionate and driven by emotion.^[23]

El-Kurd has stated that for Palestinians, "every corner" of life is filled with challenges and obstacles. He maintains that Israeli state structures are designed to oppress Palestinians, to make them want to leave, or to force them to leave.^[22]

El-Kurd notes that occupation does not only mean that Palestinians carry a different-colored ID, that their freedom of movement is restricted, and that their land is constantly at risk of theft, but also that they "live a life that is devalued every few years", as he describes it.^[23]

El-Kurd characterizes some tools of the Israeli state are techniques of colonization, such as isolating Palestinian villages by declaring the land around them to be national parks. He maintains that Israel continues to actively colonize Palestine and that there are still many regimes around the world propagating colonialism, adapting to an increasingly progressive world by making itself less obvious than what he calls the explicit colonization that Israel carries out.^[22]

El-Kurd speaks of a Palestinian reality in East Jerusalem where oppression (evictions, demolitions) is hierarchical and normalized, muzzling and gaslighting Palestinian residents. He personally has questioned whether he would have the energy to fight back again oppression as characteristic of Palestinians sometimes being "exhausted" from lifelong oppression. Breaking through and deciding to fight back he described, was a moment of understanding the psychological warfare as a turning point to the realization that he was worthy (of housing, in this case) at the most basic level.^[22]

He describes a Palestinian realization of worth – despite burnout and exhaustion continuing to be realities – regarding the right to five things:^[22]

• worthy of housing
• worthy of dignity
• worthy to be able to rebel
• worthy to be able to advocate
• worthy of liberation

In 2021, El-Kurd stated that much of the Zionist project has involved:^[22]

• Dismantling and fragmenting Palestinian unity
• Overthrowing the fabric of Palestinian societies
• Creating disparate realities between Palestinians living in Israel proper (Israeli Arabs), East Jerusalem, the West Bank east of the Separation Barrier, and in the Gaza Strip.

He concluded that the collective protests against expulsion in his home neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, showed unprecedented unity among the different groups overcoming the delusions that separation had created.^[22]

El-Kurd argues that activists should move beyond messages that are generally perceived as respectable in Western society and media, to deliver fully truthful messages about Palestine-Israel and other conflicts. Respectability, he states, is dressing a certain way, expressing healing a certain way, speaking only on certain topics with "respectable" vocabulary and qualifiers. Disregarding respectability manifests itself in various ways, including:^[25]

• Topics: Activists should advocate for sanctions against Israel, and call out Israeli expansion and Zionism, which he calls a racist ideology.
• Vocabulary: mainstream Western news outlets camouflage the intensity of violence that Israeli forces inflict on Palestinians, e.g. using the phrase “forced eviction” instead of “ethnic cleansing”
• "Flattening" humanization: those who empathize with Palestinians and humanize them may inadvertently "flatten" Palestinians' reality i.e. fail to encapsulate the entire scope of Palestinians’ humanity by for example portraying them as helpless victims. El-Kurd is known for his willingness to tell the blunt reality of Palestinian existence in its full spectrum including disdain, rage, hatred, joy, revolution, and fear, and encourages pro-Palestinian activists to do the same.

El-Kurd has stated that the first step in achieving reparations of changing realities on the ground is to get people to understand "the correct" narrative and "on the right side of history", a grassroots narrative from Palestinian "street culture", not a narrative coöpted by Palestinians who are the elite or who have ties to U.S., Israeli institutions or the Palestinian Authority, which he says is corrupt and a "co-pilot of the Israeli occupation".^[22]

El-Kurd challenges Western media that regularly ask Palestinian guests to denounce violent protests or attacks by Hamas and other groups, characterizing these questions as inciting, bigoted and disrespectful. To one such question from a CNN anchor, El-Kurd responded "Do you support the violent dispossession of me and my family?". He said that the incident was an example that Palestinians will no longer accept "racism and misrepresentation" on Western television, and that like him, they "really don't take shit" any longer.^[22]

A poem in El-Kurd's poem "Rifqa",^[26] in the eponymous 2021 book, contains a line where an Israeli "they" "harvest organs of the martyred, feed their warriors our own."^[27] El-Kurd responded to criticism by clarifying he was referring to the 2009 Aftonbladet Israel controversy about Israeli doctors allegedly harvesting organs from Palestinian corpses without the permission of their families. El-Kurd said, “It’s a metaphor, it’s not something I literally believe. I’m just now realizing that they actually think, or are pretending to think for purposes of exaggeration, that I actually believe Israelis eat Palestinian organs.... At first it was comical, but now it seems very sinister. The line is about the practice of withholding Palestinian bodies and [...] exploiting the bodies in ways that have been documented and are widely discussed."^[28] His scheduled speaking appearances have generated controversy and in several cases his speaking invitations have been rescinded.^[29] For instance, the Anti-Defamation League called for Georgetown Law School to cancel an invitation for him to speak at the university in 2022. ^[30]

El-Kurd's speech on 14 January 2024 at the Palestine Solidarity Campaign "March for Palestine" demonstration in London was widely criticized as antisemitic for its mention of de-zionization as well as the mention of "massacres as the status quo",^[31] with British MP Robert Jenrick calling for the arresting and deporting of individuals who make such remarks.^[31]

El-Kurd stated: "Zionism is apartheid, it's genocide, it's murder. It's a racist ideology, rooted in settler expansion and racist domination. We must root it out of the world. We must de-Zionize because Zionism is a death cult".^[31] He described Hamas militants killed by Israel as "martyrs", which could potentially violate UK and Israeli laws.^[31]

Concluding the speech, El-Kurd stated "Our day will come, but we must not be complacent. Our day will come but we must normalize massacres as the status-quo",^[31] which some interpreted as a reference to the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel in which 1,200 people were killed.^[31] At first, the activist responded to reports of the controversy by stating "Lots of ppl reporting this speech to the police. Idgaf. Zionism is indefensible".^[32] However, El-Kurd, whose native language is Arabic, later clarified multiple times on X that he had misspoken, by forgetting to negate the verb in the sentence:^[33][34]

It is clear from the context of my speech on 13 January 2024 that I denounce massacres, murder, and genocide and that the closing of my speech was to state “we should NOT normalise massacres”. I was also clearly referring to the massacres perpetrated by Israel against the Palestinian people. I reject the bad faith attempts to slander me as someone who would encourage or promote unlawful violence. I don’t want to waste more time on this matter, because we all should be focusing on the horrors in Gaza

He further stated that he was "obviously not an idiot" and "would never" call for violence.^[35]

London's Metropolitan Police launched a formal investigation.^[31][32] El-Kurd later said on social media that the police had interviewed him and then dropped the case.^[36]