el-Kurd, Mohammed
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El-Kurd frames his account of Sheikh Jarrah — the East Jerusalem neighborhood where his family has faced eviction proceedings since the 1970s — as a personal window into what he describes as a decades-long pattern of Palestinian displacement rooted in the 1948 Nakba, when his grandmother's family, like other Sheikh Jarrah families, was forced out of their original home by Zionist paramilitaries that later formed the Israeli military. He recounts his family's decades of Israeli court proceedings over their home (over 50 expulsion orders by his account), arguing the Israeli judiciary structurally favors settler claimants by accepting Israeli-side documentation while refusing to authenticate Ottoman-era, Jordanian, or UN land records held by Palestinian families — a asymmetry he says exposes the disputes as political and demographic rather than genuine legal or "real estate" matters, notwithstanding Israeli officials' framing of them as such. He describes organizing the 2021 Sheikh Jarrah media campaign (after returning from graduate school in New York) specifically to make this asymmetry visible internationally, crediting the resulting global attention with pressuring Israel's Supreme Court to pause the neighborhood's eviction orders pending a land registry process he expects to ultimately favor Israeli settler organizations.
He argues that the conflict is best understood as a colonial and demographic project rather than a religious or "ancient" one, citing (in his account) explicitly secular and often atheist founders of Zionism, and pointing to what he calls a three-tiered legal status system dividing Palestinians into citizens (with restricted rights, inside Israel), West Bank residents under military occupation and permit restrictions, and Gaza residents under blockade — alongside residency-only status (no citizenship) for Jerusalem Palestinians like himself despite generations of residence. On antisemitism, el-Kurd states unequivocally that historical persecution of Jewish people has been "obviously wrong," while rejecting Netanyahu's formulation that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism, and criticizing organizations like the ADL (citing its role, in his account, in police-training programs and surveillance of Black and anti-apartheid activists) as using antisemitism accusations to suppress pro-Palestinian advocacy. He defends a past comparison he drew between Israeli actions and Hitler, framing it as a comprehensible reaction under extreme provocation (settlers burning his neighborhood in 2021) rather than a considered rhetorical strategy, while arguing Palestinians face what he calls "exceptionalism" — being denied forms of protest (boycott, armed or rhetorical resistance) that are celebrated when used by other resisting populations, such as Ukrainians.
On violence, el-Kurd argues that rocket fire from Hamas and other Palestinian armed resistance are responses to what he describes as the underlying conditions of blockade and occupation rather than unprovoked aggression, framing the relevant moral question as which side's violence gets institutionally normalized versus condemned, though he states he does not believe violence alone will bring change and does not think it should be glorified, only understood in context; he also states his personal skepticism that violent resistance is currently effective given the power imbalance with the Israeli military. He is critical of both the Palestinian Authority (citing its 2021 killing of activist Nizar Banat and its security-coordination role, which he calls subcontracting for the Israeli occupation) and Hamas's governing capacity, while arguing neither Palestinian faction holds meaningful power compared to Israel, which he identifies as "the only body that can flip the switch." Discussing a two-state versus one-state solution, el-Kurd says he doesn't believe a two-state solution is geographically feasible given West Bank settlement density, and argues instead for what he summarizes as recognition, return of refugees, and redistribution of land and wealth; he is emphatic that this vision does not entail expelling or harming Israeli Jews, and that framing his position as seeking "the murder of all Jews" or ethnic cleansing in reverse is, in his view, a distortion used to deflect from what he calls the "low-hanging fruit" of ending occupation, home demolitions, and the blockade of Gaza.
He discusses U.S. policy (roughly $3.8 billion in annual military aid to Israel) as, in his assessment, serving no interest of ordinary American taxpayers, and criticizes American media coverage for omitting occupation context, uncritically adopting Israeli government framing (e.g., "Hamas-run hospital"), and predominantly quoting Israeli officials. He invokes Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani's framework of three historical obstacles to Palestinian liberation — "local reactionary leadership," normalizing Arab regimes, and what Kanafani called the "imperialist-Zionist enemy" — mapping the Abraham Accords onto the second category as, in his view, transactional state deals rather than genuine reconciliation. He describes his shift toward writing primarily in English (despite considering his Arabic prose stronger) as an attempt to close what he sees as a gap between how Palestinians are discussed domestically versus internationally, while lamenting that English-language writing about Palestine is constrained to fact-correction and advocacy rather than the more philosophical register he says is available to him in Arabic. The conversation closes on his account of Palestinian cultural resilience — humor amid hardship, prison culture as a site of continued education and civic participation, and public mourning rituals that he interprets not as glorifying death but as a refusal to let occupation "break the spirit" — and his stated hope that historical injustices, however entrenched and once broadly defended as legal, have consistently proven unsustainable over time.
Excerpts
On why he considers the Sheikh Jarrah eviction disputes political rather than legal, given the asymmetric treatment of ownership documents in Israeli courts:
“The Israeli courts would look at the Israeli documents, which we argue are falsified and fabricated, and they would take them at face value without authentication, and they refused to look at our documents... 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... but rather a very, very political battle.”
On why he rejects the equation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, and his view of how accusations of antisemitism have been used against Palestinian advocacy:
“I can guarantee you Benjamin Netanyahu has no problem with anti-Semitism... So the Israeli regime does not have a problem with anti-Semites when it serves its interests... 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.”
On what he says his vision for the future does and does not entail, in response to being asked whether he wants Israel to "be gone":
“I'm not fixated on ethnic cleansing, I'm not obsessed with ethnic cleansing. I'm obsessed with ending the ethnic cleansing campaign that has been visited upon me and my family and my community for seven plus decades... A little boy from Jerusalem should be able to go jog around the city without fearing getting shot. That's the simplest thing we're asking for here, and we want our land back, and those things do not mean actually at all the ethnic cleansing of another people.”