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Lex Fridman Podcast

#391 – Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine

Mon, 24 Jul 2023

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Mohammed El-Kurd is a Palestinian writer and poet. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Factor: https://factormeals.com/lex50 and use code lex50 to get 50% off first box - SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex to get free security camera plus 20% off - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off - Babbel: https://babbel.com/lexpod and use code Lexpod to get 55% off - House of Macadamias: https://houseofmacadamias.com/lex and use code LEX to get 20% off your first order Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/mohammed-el-kurd-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Mohammed's Twitter: https://twitter.com/m7mdkurd Mohammed's Instagram: https://instagram.com/mohammedelkurd Mohammed's Website: https://mohammedelkurd.com Rifqa (book): https://amzn.to/3Oqippl Books Mentioned: The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (book): https://amzn.to/3K7ZtsE PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (10:41) - Palestine (35:09) - Hate (48:40) - Antisemitism (56:37) - Peace in the Middle East (1:03:34) - West Bank (1:13:43) - Hamas (1:23:31) - Two-state solution (1:39:21) - Jerusalem (1:46:04) - Role of the US (1:47:54) - Ghassan Kanafani (1:58:39) - 2024 Elections (1:59:48) - Poetry (2:09:08) - Language (2:17:36) - Hope

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0.109 - 21.248 Lex Fridman

The following is a conversation with Mohammad 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.

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22.069 - 45.787 Lex Fridman

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.

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47.213 - 75.167 Lex Fridman

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 former one, that is truly the most challenging in conversations and in life. But to me, it is the only way.

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76.997 - 97.84 Lex Fridman

And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Factor for delicious pre-made meals, SimpliSafe for home security, BetterHelp for mental health, Babbel for learning new languages, and House of Macadamias for delicious snacks. Choose wisely, my friends.

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98.681 - 114.649 Lex Fridman

Also, if you want to work with our amazing team, we're always hiring at lexfreeman.com slash hiring. And now on to the full ad reads. Never any ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, but if you must skip them, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.

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115.83 - 140.644 Lex Fridman

This show is brought to you by Factor, a ready-to-eat meal kit service that delivers nutritious and delicious meals straight to your door. I've been eating their stuff for quite a while now, and it brings joy, diversity, and deliciousness into my life. primarily because they eat keto, and so it's not trivial to cook for very low-carb meals.

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141.024 - 163.971 Lex Fridman

In fact, it provides you with a bunch of different keto meals. I think I've tried herb-crusted chicken. I've tried their chorizo chili. There's just a bunch of stuff. It's high in nutritiousness, high in deliciousness. It's funny to think of life as a process of figuring out what makes you feel good in all aspects of life.

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164.351 - 180.997 Lex Fridman

And food is one of the few fundamental components that can make your life miserable, you can make your life beautiful. I used to eat many, many meals a day, high in carbs, work out a lot. And I realized you can still work out a lot. You can still exercise and have...

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182.077 - 202.744 Lex Fridman

intense physical and mental things in your life while not eating many meals at all in fact fasting the entirety of the day and only eating once a day sometimes fasting for multiple days or doing intermittent fasting, where you don't eat for 16 or 18 hours. It's like a magical discovery about your own body that you can make.

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203.384 - 220.227 Lex Fridman

Of course, others will give you advice, but that advice is only a kind of catalyst to explore. You really ultimately should be listening to your own body. And for me, low carb with a small number of meals a day, oftentimes just one, is what makes me feel really good.

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221.198 - 246.677 Lex Fridman

Anyway, if you want to do that kind of thing and make it delicious, go to factormeals.com slash Lex50 and use code Lex50 to get 50% off your first box. That's factormeals.com slash Lex50 and use code Lex50. This show is brought to you by SimpliSafe, a home security company designed to be simple and effective. It's one of the many layers of security that I use.

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247.617 - 271.754 Lex Fridman

I take security very seriously in the physical, in the cyber, and increasingly in the psychological mental space. And I suggest that everybody should do the same. The thing that makes SimpliSafe really interesting is how easy it is to get it working. To set up all the sensors, to get it working, and to keep it working.

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273.014 - 299.872 Lex Fridman

There's a cool new feature that I got that's called, I think, Fast Protect Monitoring, where you have a monitoring agent that can see and speak to and deter intruders through their smart alarm indoor camera. That's a pretty cool and wild feature. If I was an intruder, maybe an accidental intruder, I'd be kind of terrified if I'd go through that, experience that kind of interaction. So...

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300.912 - 324.864 Lex Fridman

The many layers of deterrence, I think, is really important to basic security. Anyway, go to simplisafe.com slash flex to get 20% off any SimpliSafe system when you sign up for fast protect monitoring. That's simplisafe.com slash flex. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help. Like I mentioned, security is very important.

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325.504 - 358.577 Lex Fridman

And what BetterHelp does is a psychological mental security. to make sure that the foundation of your mind are strong. We all have demons. We all have trauma. We all have things we're contending with in our conscious and subconscious minds. Bringing them to the surface, reverse engineering it, traveling to the past, then traveling back into the present so you can build a good future

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359.508 - 390.599 Lex Fridman

It's a really important process for being healthy. I don't know why the previous several sentences kind of sound like an Instagram motivational poster, but I mean it. It's a little too simply said, but it is true nevertheless. And I've been going through a lot in my mind through doing some of the difficult conversations I had to do and still do in the future and just trying to figure out my life.

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392.415 - 416.077 Lex Fridman

So doing a lot of introspection, soul searching, and really taking my mental health increasingly seriously has been a priority for me. And if it is for you as well, I think BetterHelp is one of the easiest, most effective ways to get started. You can check them out at betterhelp.com slash Lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com slash Lex.

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417.386 - 441.95 Lex Fridman

This show is also brought to you by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. They offer multiple languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, Russian, and so on. I'm increasingly taking languages seriously. To state the obvious, they are one of the fundamental barriers in communication between the various peoples of the world.

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444.011 - 473.779 Lex Fridman

And that silly little barrier sometimes trivially prevent us from seeing the common humanity in us. And so for myself, I'm starting to learn more and more languages just to start to feel the music of the language. But I'm also, from a podcast interview perspective, I'm opening myself up to do interviews in other languages and to also do translation and to take translation seriously at scale.

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474.74 - 503.46 Lex Fridman

I imagine a kid growing up in a rural India or rural China or somewhere in South America and just to be able to speak to him or her, just to show that there's hope that we're all in this together, that there's so much beauty in this world and there's so much awesomeness that we can create together. I think that's a really, really important thing to strive for.

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503.64 - 521.692 Lex Fridman

And I think technology increasingly unlocks that. Anyway, to work on your own language skills, I suggest you try Babbel. You can get 55% off your Babbel subscription at babbel.com slash lexpod, spelled B-A-B-B-E-L dot com slash lexpod. Rules and restrictions apply.

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523.193 - 553.012 Lex Fridman

This show is also brought to you by Hassan Macadamias, a company that ships delicious, high-quality, and healthy macadamia nuts directly to your door. I have a kitchen closet full of macadamia nut snacks that I've been slowly working my way through. And by working, I mean loving every second of it. There are really small portions, which is great for me because I'm not good at moderation.

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553.452 - 580.535 Lex Fridman

So I like when the packaging enforces moderation. And it's just a diversity of deliciousness. Also, I'll bring it to the podcast studio and share it with guests so they can partake in the plethora of flavors that is the House of Macadamia snacks. I'm still not sure what my favorite is, actually. Like with the almond drink, I'm really sure that watermelon salt is my favorite flavor.

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581.096 - 601.128 Lex Fridman

But House of Macadamia is... Man, there's so much good stuff. Both the whole nuts and the bars. Just really, really, really, really delicious. And obviously, it's super healthy for you, at least if you have the similar kind of nutritional and diet perspectives on life as I do.

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601.689 - 645.46 Lex Fridman

Go to HouseOfMacadamias.com to get a free box of the bestseller, the Namibian Sea Salted Macadamia Nuts, plus 20% off your entire order. That's HouseOfMacadamias.com. This is the Lex Friedman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Muhammad L. Kurd. Tell me about Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood in East Jerusalem where you grew up.

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645.905 - 669.918 Mohammed El-Kurd

Sheikh Jarrah is, 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 Sheikh Jarrah,

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670.778 - 694.592 Mohammed El-Kurd

were expelled from their homes in the Nakba in 1948, and they were forced out by the Haganah and other Zionist parallel militaries 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 Sheikh Jarrah in 1956. Sheikh Jarrah was established as a refugee housing unit.

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696.025 - 715.067 Mohammed El-Kurd

by the United Nations and by the Jordanian government, which had control over that part of Jerusalem 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.

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715.147 - 744.433 Mohammed El-Kurd

And then in the 70s, you had certain 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 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 real pull in the courts.

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745.133 - 761.865 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 refused to look at our documents. They refused to look at the documents from the Jordanian government, the documents from the UN, the documents from the Ottoman archives.

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762.446 - 779.337 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 battle.

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781.838 - 806.626 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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808.968 - 834.406 Mohammed El-Kurd

In 2009, rifle-wielding settlers accompanied by police and Israeli military came over and shoved our neighbors outside of their home around 5 a.m. 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

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835.854 - 843.88 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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844.441 - 850.946 Lex Fridman

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

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851.405 - 876.759 Mohammed El-Kurd

Between the 70s and 2009, there had been many dozens of expulsions orders against us and against many other families in the neighborhood. 28 families in total, actually. And in 2008, 2009, the first wave of expulsions finally happened. It actually began with... Um 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.

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877.7 - 890.112 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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890.132 - 908.551 Mohammed El-Kurd

A few months later, the Ghawi and Hanoun 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 Ghawi and Hanoun families, about 35 people, were thrown out in the middle of the street right across from us.

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910.29 - 932.548 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 what God wants. This is the promised land.

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932.628 - 959.744 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 continued to be in courts for the following decade. 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 subject me to their racism and biases and so on and so forth.

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959.784 - 983.764 Mohammed El-Kurd

And I had to prove my humanity time and time again. And I had to do all of this, all with broken English. And we were lucky even if we got a quote 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.

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983.784 - 1008.826 Mohammed El-Kurd

And he tells me, you know, 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, right? 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.

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1008.886 - 1034.03 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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1034.991 - 1060.38 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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1061.481 - 1085.816 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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1085.996 - 1096.663 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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1097.263 - 1124.833 Lex Fridman

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, shake your eyes 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.

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1126.014 - 1154.973 Lex Fridman

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.

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1155.99 - 1180.232 Mohammed El-Kurd

Yeah, I mean, 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.

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1180.272 - 1204.046 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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1204.066 - 1223.835 Mohammed El-Kurd

So obviously they're gonna 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.

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1225.475 - 1240.062 Mohammed El-Kurd

We're talking about Sheikh Jaraha, 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, for example me, I don't have a citizenship. I'm a resident, a mere resident.

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1240.602 - 1264.263 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 Syrian Golan. They are not citizens, they are just residents in their own hometowns.

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1265.243 - 1293.582 Mohammed El-Kurd

This is an important piece, but all of this gets convoluted and lost in translation, and I think I would argue 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.

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1294.083 - 1313.118 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 are going to be torn apart.

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1314.059 - 1335.915 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 it was 95% of building permits applications submitted by Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are rejected by the Israeli authorities.

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1336.376 - 1355.611 Mohammed El-Kurd

And to make this even more absurd, the guy the councilman who is responsible for rejecting and accepting building permit applications, his name is Yonatan Youssef, and he's an activist in the settler movements, and he's a Jerusalem council member.

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1357.461 - 1379.854 Mohammed El-Kurd

And he, last week, following the expulsion of a subloban 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.

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1380.014 - 1406.829 Mohammed El-Kurd

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. And this is similar to Masaf Riata 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.

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1408.409 - 1423.955 Mohammed El-Kurd

And recently they were expelled from their homes. Over a thousand people were expelled from their remote small villages. Again, if you're reading American media, it would say Palestinians living in firing zones. were removed because they were living in a military zone.

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1424.555 - 1442.799 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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1442.839 - 1460.21 Mohammed El-Kurd

This is declassified information that was released from the Israeli State Archive that was later reported on by Ha'aretz. 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

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1461.158 - 1482.932 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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1483.352 - 1486.254 Lex Fridman

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

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1486.4 - 1497.672 Mohammed El-Kurd

I mean, we have lawyers, but 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.

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1499.594 - 1505.32 Lex Fridman

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

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1505.6 - 1508.043 Mohammed El-Kurd

Yeah. So was Jim Crow was legal also, you know.

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1509.164 - 1513.196 Lex Fridman

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

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1513.577 - 1542.872 Mohammed El-Kurd

Absolutely. History has shown us time and time again. That legality does not necessarily mean morality, and 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.

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1543.769 - 1552.055 Lex Fridman

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

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1553.496 - 1583.909 Mohammed El-Kurd

I mean, I'm not really, 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 their front yard. That's hateful.

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1584.109 - 1612.069 Mohammed El-Kurd

So I don't need confirmation. This is something we see a lot, actually. 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. The last Israeli prime minister said that he has killed many Arabs and that he has no qualms with it.

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1613.45 - 1637.763 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 up at night.

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1637.823 - 1662.253 Mohammed El-Kurd

And we use all of these 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.

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1662.813 - 1669.135 Mohammed El-Kurd

I don't need, you know, confessions from the likes of Netanyahu to understand that his heart is full of hate.

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1670.156 - 1683.7 Lex Fridman

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?

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1685.976 - 1715.508 Mohammed El-Kurd

Well, you know, like May 15th, 1948 is commemorated every year as, you know, the anniversary of the Nakba. 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 48th was rather, you know, a crystallization of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine. And what happened was that many Zionists

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1717.742 - 1749.978 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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1750.358 - 1772.009 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 Nakba.

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1772.029 - 1792.338 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 it. Many, many people who were separated from their... My grandmother herself, she lost her husband for a few months, for nine months.

0
💬 0

1792.679 - 1820.423 Mohammed El-Kurd

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... 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

0
💬 0

1822.148 - 1845.274 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 laws that say, you know, you're not legally allowed to be here. We're gonna kick you out of your home. And it's happening and it has happened in broad daylight.

0
💬 0

1847.035 - 1875.638 Mohammed El-Kurd

One piece of context for the listener who is not familiar with the Nakba, 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, you know, the British to give away.

0
💬 0

1877.699 - 1906.928 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 Zangwill said that this was a country without a people. and Palestinians who have existed there, who have cultivated the lands, who have had diverse cultural and religious and political practices, they were completely erased.

0
💬 0

1907.408 - 1940.066 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 Ironwall Colonization of Palestine Must Go Forward. And all of these schools of thoughts were then shopping around for imperialist support. for their cause.

0
💬 0

1940.086 - 1969.237 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 traces the Zionist movement, oftentimes in the Zionist's own words. And so today what we're seeing is a continuation.

0
💬 0

1969.257 - 1991.406 Mohammed El-Kurd

And people like Jabotinsky who are profoundly and explicitly racist, who have called for genocide, who have called the Palestinians barbaric, who have said and done racist things. Jabotinsky also was the founder of the Irgun, one of the other militias that later merged to become the Israeli army.

0
💬 0

1993.565 - 2016.238 Mohammed El-Kurd

which was responsible for the Deir Yassin 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 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.

0
💬 0

2016.923 - 2028.172 Lex Fridman

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.

0
💬 0

2029.734 - 2049.649 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

2050.569 - 2058.513 Mohammed El-Kurd

A lot of the time people cite the Torah and cite religious books, and sometimes Zionists will even say, like, read the Quran and blah, blah, blah.

0
💬 0

2059.113 - 2082.288 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

2082.788 - 2109.59 Mohammed El-Kurd

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

0
💬 0

2110.731 - 2113.493 Lex Fridman

Do you have hate in your heart for Israel?

0
💬 0

2114.214 - 2115.174 Mohammed El-Kurd

Why does that matter?

0
💬 0

2118.017 - 2139.513 Lex Fridman

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 contents 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.

0
💬 0

2141.292 - 2169.626 Lex Fridman

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.

0
💬 0

2170.191 - 2185.52 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

2187.202 - 2210.169 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 breathe, they cannot live. They are living under excruciating circumstances. Palestinians, I don't know how many Palestinians I've interacted with, but we are some of the most wonderful people.

0
💬 0

2210.189 - 2222.072 Mohammed El-Kurd

I mean, not all of us, I think some of us are insufferable, but most of us. Most of us, we're very hospitable. We're very hospitable.

0
💬 0

2222.132 - 2254.114 Mohammed El-Kurd

Even in the early correspondence between the mayor of Jerusalem and Herzl, who wrote The Jewish State, 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 heart-wrenching. But I personally, I think there's a lot of dignity in negating your oppressor.

0
💬 0

2254.895 - 2272.38 Mohammed El-Kurd

And I think it would be ridiculous today if we look back at Jim Crow, for example, and we ask the person who's lived 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.

0
💬 0

2273.263 - 2292.206 Lex Fridman

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?

0
💬 0

2293.087 - 2318.207 Mohammed El-Kurd

Does it cloud my judgment? I don't think so. 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

0
💬 0

2320.911 - 2343.482 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 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.

0
💬 0

2344.282 - 2369.364 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 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.

0
💬 0

2371.066 - 2393.834 Mohammed El-Kurd

And so we resort to sending our kids who will not threaten and who will not 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.

0
💬 0

2394.515 - 2422.16 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

2422.22 - 2447.369 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 our unabashedness and our refusal to bow our heads or bury our heads in the sand. I think that's the only way forward.

0
💬 0

2448.257 - 2452.739 Lex Fridman

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

0
💬 0

2453.259 - 2457.361 Mohammed El-Kurd

Absolutely. And it has been throughout history. It has been.

0
💬 0

2458.641 - 2480.32 Lex Fridman

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

0
💬 0

2482.741 - 2499.652 Mohammed El-Kurd

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,

0
💬 0

2501.929 - 2529.557 Mohammed El-Kurd

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

0
💬 0

2531.494 - 2542.278 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

2543.159 - 2547.08 Lex Fridman

Benjamin Netanyahu said, anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

0
💬 0

2547.621 - 2548.421 Mohammed El-Kurd

Of course he said that.

0
💬 0

2550.502 - 2551.242 Lex Fridman

Do you disagree?

0
💬 0

2551.802 - 2553.123 Mohammed El-Kurd

Absolutely, I disagree.

0
💬 0

2553.723 - 2566.714 Lex Fridman

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?

0
💬 0

2568.078 - 2593.083 Mohammed El-Kurd

I watched the first 20 minutes and then I couldn't do it anymore. What was interesting about Netanyahu is that he said 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.

0
💬 0

2593.103 - 2620.873 Mohammed El-Kurd

And there is so much wrong with that statement in the sense that Jewish people are a religious group and Americans and 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 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.

0
💬 0

2621.394 - 2643.353 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 conversation that are being held on CNN are, does Israel has a right to exist?

0
💬 0

2643.433 - 2670.022 Mohammed El-Kurd

Or like, why would you negate Israel's 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...

0
💬 0

2671.002 - 2696.108 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 anti-Semitism.

0
💬 0

2696.708 - 2721.876 Mohammed El-Kurd

This is the same man who has no problem getting on stage and shaking hands with Pastor John Hagee, doing 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 was sent to hunt the Jews, who said on multiple occasions that

0
💬 0

2722.677 - 2754.047 Mohammed El-Kurd

Jewish people are going to perish in hell. All of this is very viable by Google. And this is one of the Israeli regime's closest allies. So the Israeli regime does not have a problem with anti-Semites when it serves its interests. It has a problem. If you look at evangelicals or Christian Zionism at large, anti-Semitism lies at the heart of Christian Zionism.

0
💬 0

2754.067 - 2775.048 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

2775.749 - 2799.856 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 there is an ongoing colonialism happening where people every single day are killed. I cannot count this morning a kid was shot in Palestine.

0
💬 0

2799.876 - 2830.153 Mohammed El-Kurd

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,

0
💬 0

2831.226 - 2852.438 Mohammed El-Kurd

wow, the ADL, Anti-Defamation League, 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.

0
💬 0

2852.518 - 2883.903 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 shit, the ADL advised local police departments to spy on the black organizers opposing the white supremacists.

0
💬 0

2884.564 - 2888.447 Mohammed El-Kurd

This is, again, all verifiable on the internet. Go to droptheadl.org.

0
💬 0

2888.928 - 2900.497 Lex Fridman

So the ADL does not alleviate the hate in the world as it probably is designed to do.

0
💬 0

2901.332 - 2908.662 Mohammed El-Kurd

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

0
💬 0

2909.122 - 2910.123 Lex Fridman

That's what it stands for.

0
💬 0

2910.164 - 2911.445 Mohammed El-Kurd

Yeah, in case you didn't know.

0
💬 0

2911.585 - 2941.27 Lex Fridman

Now you know. If we could 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 that?

0
💬 0

2942.66 - 2959.931 Lex Fridman

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?

0
💬 0

2960.239 - 2976.106 Mohammed El-Kurd

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

0
💬 0

2976.566 - 2995.867 Lex Fridman

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?

0
💬 0

2996.748 - 3032.692 Mohammed El-Kurd

Amy Cesar talks about this a lot, the exceptionalization of Hitler. Hitler is a deplorable, I don't know, condemnable, rotten, racist, horrible human being that belongs in the depths of hell. Obviously, that goes without saying, but... I am allowed analogy and I'm allowed to say whatever I want. Now, I don't necessarily think that such an analogy is a good strategy to have.

0
💬 0

3034.452 - 3059.845 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 I also, I remember I tweeted something, I hope every single one of them dies. And to this day, like this is some kind of, you know, gotcha for me.

0
💬 0

3060.066 - 3083.344 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 antisemitic.

0
💬 0

3083.704 - 3103.159 Mohammed El-Kurd

We're not allowed to do anything. So what are we allowed? 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? Maybe Netanyahu can send me a manual he's happy with.

0
💬 0

3103.98 - 3121.014 Lex Fridman

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

0
💬 0

3122.216 - 3147.543 Mohammed El-Kurd

Well, it 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 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.

0
💬 0

3148.883 - 3170.618 Mohammed El-Kurd

And again, this is yet another case of Palestinian exceptionalism, because when it comes to Ukraine, people have no problem seeing Ukrainians defending their homes, seeing Ukrainians dying for their land, seeing Ukrainians making makeshift molotovs on Sky News. Sky News was running molotov-making cocktails.

0
💬 0

3171.218 - 3199.988 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 championing a 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.

0
💬 0

3200.028 - 3219.339 Mohammed El-Kurd

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... without a guarantee that if we leave our house, we're not going to be shot, and we're supposed to not do anything about it. That is absurd.

0
💬 0

3219.359 - 3244.267 Mohammed El-Kurd

Any person watching this understands this completely. People understand that if somebody is attacking your home, you fight back. If somebody is attacking your family, you fight back. That is not. But again, who gets to call who a terrorist? Who gets to define terrorism? This is all about who has power. Who gets to write these laws? Who gets to write these definitions?

0
💬 0

3244.327 - 3280.352 Mohammed El-Kurd

Why is it that American actions in Iraq is not called terrorism by American politicians? Violence is like this... mutating concept, you know, and it takes on many shapes and forms. And if it's in a uniform, 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. We make games about it.

0
💬 0

3280.992 - 3290.859 Mohammed El-Kurd

But if it's without a uniform, if it has a thick accent, if it has a beard, you know, that's condemnable. That's wrong. That's terrorism, you know?

0
💬 0

3291.319 - 3295.441 Lex Fridman

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

0
💬 0

3296.082 - 3319.855 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3322.256 - 3341.785 Mohammed El-Kurd

And I think I would be naive if... I don't take the power imbalance into consideration. One side has makeshift weapons, and the other side is one of the most sophisticated armies in the world. So I don't know how effective violence could be in this case.

0
💬 0

3342.298 - 3361.939 Lex Fridman

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

0
💬 0

3362.771 - 3373.557 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3373.597 - 3396.692 Mohammed El-Kurd

But if you look at the history, like 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.

0
💬 0

3397.633 - 3401.756 Lex Fridman

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

0
💬 0

3403.218 - 3430.388 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3431.65 - 3451.065 Mohammed El-Kurd

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...

0
💬 0

3451.966 - 3475.662 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3476.363 - 3480.884 Lex Fridman

Can you describe recognition, redistribution, return and redistribution?

0
💬 0

3481.044 - 3506.311 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3506.911 - 3528.044 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3533.487 - 3550.569 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3551.09 - 3563.4 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3563.9 - 3565.622 Lex Fridman

You mentioned the wall. Can you describe the wall?

0
💬 0

3566.175 - 3594.68 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3595.973 - 3615.827 Mohammed El-Kurd

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

0
💬 0

3617.423 - 3641.253 Mohammed El-Kurd

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

0
💬 0

3643.155 - 3667.941 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3667.981 - 3685.916 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3686.836 - 3715.906 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3716.046 - 3737.183 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

3737.703 - 3760.541 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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3761.082 - 3790.075 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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3790.115 - 3813.862 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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3814.611 - 3825.655 Lex Fridman

So West Bank is a large region where a lot of Palestinian people live, and then there are settlements sprinkled throughout. And those settlements have walls around them with security cameras.

0
💬 0

3825.675 - 3826.735 Mohammed El-Kurd

And security guards.

0
💬 0

3827.015 - 3827.735 Lex Fridman

Security guards.

0
💬 0

3827.755 - 3829.956 Mohammed El-Kurd

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

0
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3830.716 - 3844.001 Lex Fridman

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

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3844.406 - 3864.292 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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3865.232 - 3890.163 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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3891.544 - 3921.01 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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3921.95 - 3940.563 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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3941.523 - 3966.069 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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3966.109 - 3983.153 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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3985.518 - 4002.65 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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4004.46 - 4026.995 Lex Fridman

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.

0
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4029.017 - 4050.039 Lex Fridman

The Israeli military said it dismantled hundreds of explosives, cleared hundreds of weapons, destroyed underground hideouts, and confiscated hundreds of thousands of dollars in, quote, 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.

0
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4050.74 - 4073.692 Lex Fridman

Palestinian attacks inside Israel have killed 24 people this year. UN experts describe the Jenin operation as collective punishment, in quotes, 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.

0
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4074.112 - 4099.78 Lex Fridman

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?

0
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4100.478 - 4124.127 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

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4124.167 - 4151.349 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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4151.429 - 4177.538 Mohammed El-Kurd

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,

0
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4179.19 - 4199.093 Mohammed El-Kurd

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...

0
💬 0

4200.374 - 4233.797 Mohammed El-Kurd

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

0
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4236.24 - 4258.352 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

4259.652 - 4262.334 Lex Fridman

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

0
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4262.924 - 4283.062 Mohammed El-Kurd

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

0
💬 0

4283.562 - 4299.19 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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4300.05 - 4310.455 Lex Fridman

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

0
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4312.406 - 4333.972 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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4335.362 - 4367.602 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

4367.622 - 4390.876 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
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4391.336 - 4415.042 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

4415.783 - 4422.126 Mohammed El-Kurd

But God forbid, God forbid Palestinians have any kind of similar sentiment.

0
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4423.214 - 4449.585 Lex Fridman

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.

0
💬 0

4449.605 - 4453.106 Lex Fridman

What do you think about Hamas firing rockets into Israel?

0
💬 0

4455.508 - 4483.085 Mohammed El-Kurd

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.

0
💬 0

4483.125 - 4508.243 Mohammed El-Kurd

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 not violent people at the core.

0
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4508.303 - 4539.754 Mohammed El-Kurd

And I think what serves this narrative is Islamophobia, is xenophobia towards Arabs, which I don't have the luxury to write laws about. By the way, I'm quite frustrated by this. I am preoccupied, and the Palestinian people are preoccupied, with the material violence that we have to deal with on the day-to-day, the demolitions, the bombings, the imprisonment. That's what we're distracted with.

0
💬 0

4541.335 - 4556.482 Mohammed El-Kurd

busy with, that we can't even talk about the racism, the casual racism against us, the anti-Palestinian racism, be it in the media, on social media, in diplomatic circles. But all of this racism that has gone unchecked, that has not been regulated,

0
💬 0

4557.763 - 4580.018 Mohammed El-Kurd

for decades, allows for these tropes to continue, in which Palestinians are promoted as these barbaric terrorists, and the only way we could remedy that situation is by marketing them as these defenseless victims. But the fact of the matter is not this simplistic. Palestinian people are human beings who

0
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4580.738 - 4595.541 Mohammed El-Kurd

should enjoy a full spectrum of humanity, which includes rage, which includes disdain, which includes happiness and joy and laughter, which includes celebration, which includes all of these things. But we're not allowed this.

0
💬 0

4595.981 - 4609.164 Mohammed El-Kurd

But we are doing exactly what any people throughout history who have been oppressed, who have been colonized, who have been occupied, have done and continue to do, as we see in Ukraine, which is celebrated by mainstream media. I'm sorry to

0
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4610.464 - 4634.035 Mohammed El-Kurd

keep reiterating this point, but at this point I am quite exhausted by how exceptional Palestine and Palestinian resistance is when the world tells me time and time again that it doesn't have a problem with violence, it just has a problem with who does that violence.

0
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4635.677 - 4660.523 Lex Fridman

Do you in your mind and the way you see this region draw a distinction between the people in power versus the regular people? So you mentioned the Palestinian people. Is there something you can comment on Hamas and the PLO? Do you see them as fundamentally different from the people? What does Hamas do well? Where do they fall short?

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4662.082 - 4690.946 Mohammed El-Kurd

I think governments, wherever, globally, are different from people. No government is a true reflection of its people. I think this is even true in the case of Arab countries that normalize with Israel. In many of the cases, they're unelected governments. I think the Palestinian Authority continues to fail. I think they are subcontractors of the Israeli regime through their security coordination.

0
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4692.167 - 4719.954 Mohammed El-Kurd

And also, I'd like to use this as an opportunity to comment a little bit on the analogy thing, not to stray away from the question, but you know, the Palestinian Authority two years ago killed an opposition activist named Nizar Banat. It was a horrendous crime. And I was in Ramallah with the people protesting against the Palestinian Authority.

0
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4720.734 - 4742.924 Mohammed El-Kurd

And at some point they had their batons, the Palestinian Authority police, and they beat us with it. And many of the people in the crowd were liking the Palestinian Authority to Zionism. I think people, this is what people do. when they are confronted by a great evil, they liken it to some other great evil. And this is where the Hitler analogy came from.

0
💬 0

4742.944 - 4753.747 Mohammed El-Kurd

Again, I don't think it's the best strategy moving forward, but I refuse to be criminalized for a little sentence.

0
💬 0

4754.827 - 4782.385 Lex Fridman

but to linger on those in power. So one of the criticisms towards Hamas and PLO, towards the Israeli government, at least the current coalition government, is that, that there's a lot of incentive to sort of perpetuate violence to maintain power. There's a hunger for power and maintaining that power amongst the powerful. That's the way power works.

0
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4783.105 - 4800.848 Lex Fridman

So is there a worry you have about those in power not having the best interests of its people? So those in power, the PLO, Hamas, not having the best interests not being incentivized towards peace, towards justice.

0
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4802.904 - 4837.819 Mohammed El-Kurd

You know, looking at the PA's action today, it tells you a great deal about what they're interested in and what they're not interested in. And maybe, yeah, the occupation is in their best interest. And you can infer similar things looking at Hamas. But these two entities virtually have no power, even Hamas. There is the context that Hamas is permitted by international law to use armed resistance.

0
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4838.399 - 4866.809 Mohammed El-Kurd

Does that mean Hamas is equipped to govern Gaza? I don't think so. Does that mean that people around Palestine necessarily want to live under... Hamas rule. In 2006, Hamas was democratically elected. I don't know if that's still the case today. There's a lot to be said, but neither of these entities have any real power in perpetuating.

0
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4867.149 - 4891.423 Mohammed El-Kurd

The only body that has access, that can flip the switch on all of this equation is Israelis. They're the ones who are keeping people in a cage. They're the ones who are wrapping the West Bank with a wall. Everything else to me is just secondary, regardless of what I think personally of any of those people.

0
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4892.184 - 4920.452 Mohammed El-Kurd

Personally for me, the world I envision, not just Palestine, the world I envision is a world that goes beyond states. That goes beyond this framing of power, this hierarchy in which some people rule over other people. This whole idea of nation states, be it Israel or any other nation states, it's futile. It's not good. It's exclusive. I think that we can achieve a better world than that.

0
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4921.553 - 4947.139 Lex Fridman

Well, how do you do a better world? Actually, if you just linger on that, politically speaking, geopolitically, you have to have representation of the people. You have to have laws and you have to have leaders and governing bodies that enact those laws and all those kinds of things. You probably need to have militaries to protect the people.

0
💬 0

4947.719 - 4949.52 Mohammed El-Kurd

Can you not imagine a world without militaries?

0
💬 0

4950.461 - 4952.302 Lex Fridman

I can imagine it, but we're not in that world.

0
💬 0

4953.203 - 4977.119 Mohammed El-Kurd

Yeah, I'm not saying I have all the answers or a PowerPoint in my pocket with the instructions, but I'm saying the world I'd like to live in is one that transcends borders, is one that does not necessitate militaries, that doesn't necessitate all of these prisons, all of these walls, all of these racist laws.

0
💬 0

4977.819 - 4985.907 Lex Fridman

So you don't think violence is a fundamental part of human nature that emerges combined with the hunger for power?

0
💬 0

4988.067 - 4998.989 Mohammed El-Kurd

I do think both of these things are truly intrinsic to human beings. But I also do think there is a way to move beyond them. I'm not saying I have the answers.

0
💬 0

5000.75 - 5008.952 Lex Fridman

I'm tempted to say sway, but... But you have a hope that there doesn't have to be war in the world.

0
💬 0

5009.112 - 5010.532 Mohammed El-Kurd

Definitely, definitely.

0
💬 0

5011.161 - 5037.516 Lex Fridman

Well, if we look a little bit more short-term, people speak about a one-state solution and a two-state solution. What is your hope here for this part of the world? Do you see a possible future with a two-state solution, whether it's for Palestine and Israel? Do you see a one-state solution where there is a diversity of different peoples, like in the United States, and they have equal rights?

0
💬 0

5039.137 - 5041.299 Lex Fridman

in the courts than everywhere else?

0
💬 0

5042.26 - 5067.603 Mohammed El-Kurd

You know, I don't think there's a geography in which a two-state solution is possible. As we said earlier, Swiss cheese, there's literally settlements all over the West Bank. And I don't think it's fair. A two-street solution is fair to all of the people whose homes are still in Haifa, in Nazareth, in Jaffa, and so forth.

0
💬 0

5067.643 - 5078.788 Mohammed El-Kurd

And I don't think it's fair that I'm gonna have to travel to another country to visit my cousin who's married in Nazareth, for example. And beyond that, it's just not possible.

0
💬 0

5080.316 - 5107.859 Mohammed El-Kurd

I do believe that whatever you want to call it, one state, two states, 48 states, 29 states, whatever you want to call it, refugees need to return, land needs to be given back, wealth needs to be redistributed, and a recognition of the Nakba needs to happen. That is the only way we could move forward. And you know, regarding whether this is like a possible situation,

0
💬 0

5109.5 - 5136.12 Mohammed El-Kurd

for two people to live side by side. Let's ask two questions. Let's say you lived in a house with a person, your roommate, you just had a roommate who constantly beat the shit out of you. I wonder if you'd want to continue to live with them. That's one. And let's try another scenario. Let's say you live in a house with a roommate who you just absolutely hate.

0
💬 0

5138.63 - 5164.644 Mohammed El-Kurd

absolutely oppose their existence as a people. You don't even give him a key to your apartment. Let's say now you're like equal partners in the apartment. Would you want to live with him? I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. Time will tell. But I don't think they want to live with us. Israelis are quite good, especially Israeli diplomats, they're quite good at using...

0
💬 0

5166.57 - 5189.267 Mohammed El-Kurd

flowery language about peace and coexistence and so on and so forth. And they're good with making us seem insane or radical or full of hate and so on and so forth. But the policies speak for themselves. The actions on the ground speak for themselves. And I truly, I mean, every time there's an uptick, many of them leave.

0
💬 0

5189.347 - 5194.731 Mohammed El-Kurd

And I wonder, I would like to see, I wonder what would happen in a one-state solution.

0
💬 0

5195.68 - 5223.756 Lex Fridman

Well, okay, so you've spoken eloquently about the injustice of the evictions, the demolitions, the settlements. But is there, can you comment about the difficulty of the security from an Israel perspective when there is a large number of people that want to destroy it? How does Israel exist peacefully? This one-state solution.

0
💬 0

5224.079 - 5233.161 Mohammed El-Kurd

I don't know, by not shooting a journalist doing her job in the Jenin refugee camp, by not killing a 14-year-old standing in his front yard.

0
💬 0

5233.461 - 5249.064 Mohammed El-Kurd

This whole talk about security and security fence and the whole propaganda of the Israeli defense forces and this whole iron wall ideology in which somehow they're always defending themselves, even though they're... You know, Netanyahu and the Israeli government

0
💬 0

5249.944 - 5276.524 Mohammed El-Kurd

continue to talk about an existential threat, about Iran being an existential threat, even though the Israeli government is the only body that holds nuclear weapons in the region. They're the most sophisticated army in the region, and yet they continue hiding behind their fingers and talking about an existential threat and talking about how they're insecure and so on and so forth.

0
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