Mohammed El-Kurd - His Own Words

Speaker 1: Do you support the protests, the violent protests that have erupted in solidarity with you and other families in your position right now?

Mohammed El-Kurd: Do you support the violent dispossession of me and my family?

Speaker 1: I'm just asking if you support the protests that are taking place in support of your family.

Mohammed El-Kurd: I support I support popular protest taking place against ethnic cleansing.

Juan González: Yes.

Mohammed El-Kurd: Hello, international community. Thank you for these groundbreaking speeches. I'm sure the occupation authorities are really concerned right now. My name is Hamad Al-Qard and I am here to deliver a speech. When I was 11, I came home from school and saw my furniture scattered across my street in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. The street overflowed with soldiers, police, and settlers. My neighbors were screaming and protesting, some of them hospitalized. Settlers had invaded our home and taken over half of it. They said it was theirs by divine decree, as if God is a real estate agent. Now, more than a decade later, they're coming to finish what they started. Billionaire-backed settler organizations protected by the Israeli occupation forces will likely throw out my family from our home forever. Not only my family, but hundreds if not thousands of Palestinians in my neighborhood and other communities like Silwan and Al-Isawiyah and Masafaryatta and the South Hebron Hills and elsewhere. This fate of dispossession looms over much of my neighbourhood. Our lives are consumed by the anxiety of living on the brink of homelessness. The UN has called this a war crime. But more importantly, I know that this is theft. My community, like all Palestinian communities, is no stranger to dispossession. My grandmother was expelled from her home in Haifa in 1948 when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced in the Nakba. She found refuge in the 50s after the United Nations, you all, and Jordan built a housing project in Sheikh Jarrah promising that the 28 refugee families would receive legal title to their properties. Then the 1967 war happened. After Israeli forces illegally annexed Jerusalem, several settler organizations, some of which headquartered in the United States, have relentlessly attempted to take over the neighborhood. We obviously tried to fight this forced expulsion in court. But as my grandmother used to say, if the judge is your enemy, to whom do you complain? Israeli land grabbing has been rubber-coated with legislation, making it almost impossible to challenge. Even so, the battle over Sheikh Jarrah is not legal in its essence. It is political. It is part of the larger systematic effort to Israelize the entirety of Jerusalem, my native city. My family and our neighbors understand this. We know firsthand that the Israeli judicial system is created by and for those who benefit endlessly from the Israeli settler colonial regime. As I speak to you, our family lawyer is attempting to persuade a settler judge to rule against settlements. The word apartheid comes to mind. But saying there is asymmetry and injustice in the Israeli judicial system is a gross understatement. What we have on our hands is a colonialist, ideologically driven system, built by and for colonizers, working exactly as it was intended to. These unjust laws are not preferential, serving the demographic and political goals of the Zionist project. They are concealed behind a cloak of quasi-democratic, seemingly disputable legislation. This summer, we took our struggle to the streets. Our efforts to resist this takeover were joined by Palestinians across Jerusalem and the world in what became known as the Unity Uprising. The situation rapidly escalated into attacks on B.C. 's Gaza. Palestinians mobilized and resisted, and around the world, people demonstrated in support of the Palestinian right to liberation and decolonization. But months later, the word's attention has moved away. The reality for Palestinians, however, has not changed. Our neighborhood was put under a blockade for three months, maintained by Israeli forces with continuing restrictions intended to suffocate the lives of the hundreds of Palestinians who lived there. And yet, meanwhile, armed Jewish settlers who have already occupied some of our homes roam freely on the streets, no questions asked. On any given night, a dozen gun-wielding fanatics patrol my street with arrogant impunity. They are protected, even supported, by the troops blockading our community. I have to take a minute to acknowledge the millions under siege in the Gaza Strip, the millions living in an open-air prison, I have to acknowledge the thousands of Palestinian prisoners subjugated in Israeli prisons. I have to acknowledge my neighbor, Murad Atiyah, an elementary school teacher who was robbed from his family and put into prison, slapped with trumped-up and fabricated charges only because he dared say no to ethnic cleansing. You know, I have to ask, what is it that I can say today that has not been said before? How many Palestinians have stood on this platform for decades and decried the same broken promises and unfulfilled UN resolutions? How many of us have tried to articulate the atrocities that everyone in this body knows very well and still ignores? At a certain point in every Palestinian's life, we realize that the Nakba is far from over. It continues every time the Israeli occupation revokes Jerusalem residencies. It blares in street signs stripped of Arabic. It punctures us in constant campaigns of dehumanization. If you're not thrown out of your home, it's demolished. If you're not imprisoned, you're shot in the street. If you're not shot in the street, there's a drone in your sky in the Gaza Strip. If it's not a bomb, it's exile. I am tired of reporting on the same brutality every day. Of thinking of new ways to describe the obvious. The situation in my neighborhood, Sheikh Jarrah, is not hard to understand. It is a perfect microcosm of settler colonialism. The reality that Palestinians across 70 years of Zionist rule have experienced. This vocabulary is not theoretical. It is evident in the attempts to throw us out of our homes so that settlers can occupy them, with the backing of the regime whose forces and policies provide violent support for the transfer of one population to install another. I do not care whom this terminology offends. Colonial is the correct way of referring to a state whose forces collude in the violence of settlers. whose government works with settler organizations, whose judicial system uses expansionist laws to claim our homes, whose nation-state law enshrines Jewish settlements as a national value to encourage and promote. The appetite for Palestinian lands without Palestinians has not abated for even seven decades. I know this because I live it. I have no faith in the Israeli judicial system. It is part of the settler-colonial state built by settlers for settlers. Nor do I expect any of the international governments who have been deeply complicit in the Israeli colonial enterprise to intervene on our behalf. But I do have faith in people around the world, in your citizens, who protest and pressure governments to end what is essentially unconditional support for Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing. Impunity and war crimes will not be stopped by statements of condemnation and raised eyebrows. It will not be stopped by tweets of concerns. We have repeatedly articulated what kind of transformative political measures must be taken. Boycotts and state-level sanctions. The problem, again, is not ignorance. It is inaction. The United States has vetoed more than 53 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel. In fact, more than half of the vetoes that the U.S. casted were in favor of Israel. How long? must we offer the Israeli occupation impunity? Negotiations are not going to bring about peace, ending impunity well. You know, when we reflect on history's most horrible, most inhumane atrocities today, we think of them with so much moral clarity. So much moral clarity that we tend to forget that when these atrocities were happening, they were perfectly legal. Not only perfectly legal, but at the time that they were happening, they were all once controversial, contested, too complex. People talked with neutral language, like we do today. We all think that had it been us there back then, at that point of time, we would have been at the right side of history. And we have the opportunity today to be on the right side of history. I am asking all of you to be brave. The question of Palestine cannot be resolved without a freed Palestine. I know that the occupation will end. Like all injustices, it will end. It must. All empires fall. The Palestinian cause will erupt victorious. I know this. I know that people will look back at the reality we live through today with so much moral clarity. One day there will be museums honoring us, memorials in our remembrance, and statues built in our names. People will stand atop our lands and acknowledge the suffering that happened in them. I just hope that such recognition, such recourse, such reparations happen while the Palestinian people are still here. We deserve justice and liberation within our lifetime. We deserve our land back. Thank you very much.

Amy Goodman: Mohamed, can you comment overall on this situation right now and what you think needs to happen?

Mohammed El-Kurd: I honestly do not know what to tell you. It feels to me as though we are living in the very first few days of an unfolding genocide. I mean, not only are Israeli politicians and journalists alike and global forces calling for the annihilation of the Gaza Strip, for bombing it into the Stone Ages, declaring that they are interested in inflicting damage and not really precision. But these images that we are seeing coming outside of the Gaza Strip are so harrowing and devastating that one wonders how much bloodshed, how much Palestinian death is necessary for people to realize that violence begets violence and that the occupation and the colonization of Palestine, the blockade of the Gaza Strip needs to end, for all of this violence to end. I mean, I am incredibly angered that word of mouth, unverified reports of quote-unquote rape and decapitation, which obviously draw on Islamophobic tropes, have garnered more and more political and global outrage than those very images, than a video of a nurse announcing and screaming in distress that her husband has been killed in an Israeli airstrike. And the PR strategy of the Israeli regime throughout all of this has been to invoke those Islamophobic sentiments, like calling it Israel's, quote-unquote, Israel's 9-11. And media outlets and journalists who have taken on this framing without any questioning not only work to equate the violence of a besieged, politically isolated group like Hamas with the violence of al-Qaeda and ISIS and so on, but they are also doing the dirty work for Israelis. They are preemptively justifying the genocide of hundreds and thousands of Palestinians. justifying a brutal onslaught that is about to come globally. And that should be alarming. I mean, we have seen this unfold during 9-11. We have seen this unfold in history, the utilization of Islamophobia, the dehumanization, the constant dehumanizations of Palestinians, the refusal to see them as human beings who have the right to resist and to defend themselves and to be angry and to want the right to self-determination and to want to not want to live in siege anymore. All of this refusal to see all of this is contributing to this oncoming onslaught where Israeli politicians can just call Palestinian human animals, can just say that they are not really concerned with saving anyone, can threaten to bomb aid envoys coming in from Egypt. This should be concerning to everybody around the world. It is terrifying times we are living in.

Juan González: JUAN GONZÁLEZ- And this whole issue, hostage situation as well, Hamas has reported that, in one of the bombing attacks, some of the hostages were killed, along with those Hamas militants who were guarding them. What do you think the Israeli government posture will continue to be on this issue of the hostages?

Mohammed El-Kurd: I mean, so far Hamas has said that they are willing to release all of the female detainees if Israel is going to release the 36 Palestinian female prisoners currently lingering in Israeli prisons. But the Israeli government has refused to negotiate. In fact, Israeli ministers like Smotrich have said that they could not care less about uh the the hostages and their goal is to inflict as much damage as possible on the bc's gaza strip and they also want us to get one thing correctly um holding two million people under blockade is a very serious hostage situation. This is what we're dealing with. The fact that the Israeli regime has been holding Palestinians in Gaza as hostages to exert political pressure on groups like Hamas, the fact that a quarter, 25 percent of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prison are held without detention, are held without trial or charges, is a hostage situation. The fact that even in death, Palestinian corpses are held in mortuary chambers to be used as bargaining chips is a hostage situation. But time and time again, we are shown by the world its double standards. We are told that the only violence that matters is the violence inflicted upon Israelis, and the only lives that matter are the lives of Israelis. Palestinians have been living as hostages for the past 16 years in this blockade that must, must end. And it is incumbent upon us, as journalists, to make this context clear.

Amy Goodman: AMY GOODMAN We just have 30 seconds, Mohammad El-Kurd. You've been in the United States a lot. Of course, you live in Sheikh Jarrah. President Biden is about to give an address. What do you want to hear him say?

Mohammed El-Kurd: Well, I know what he is going to say about his biggest ally in the region. But I also know that my family and my neighborhood have experienced settler attacks, who they throw Molotov cocktails overnight. I know that settler violence has been intensifying both in the old city of Jerusalem and all around the occupied West Bank, and even in 1948 territories. And I know that lip service from violence is not going to address it. But the world needs to know that as long as the occupation persists, as long as the apartheid system persists, resistance to it is going to persist. It is not a difficult equation to understand. People deserve dignity and freedom and to live safely in their homes. Wow, I'm not Angela Davis, so we can relax. I cried before this, so I can make a joke, right? I came here to read poems today, which I don't get to do much often, so I'm very grateful. I want to start, if you'll allow me, I want to start in Arabic. This is one of my favorite poems ever. It's by a Palestinian writer called Rashid Hussein. It's called Dead Against. Dada an yajraha thwaru biladi sunbula Dada an yahmila tiflun ayya tiflun kunbula Dada an tadrusa akhti adalati albunduqiya Dada ma shiqtum walakin Dada an yusbihatiflun batalan filaashila Dada an yuthmira alghaman fuada ashshajara Dada an tusbihaghsana basatini mashanik Dada tahwila hayyadi alwardi fi ardi mashanik ضد ما شئتم ولكن بعد إحراق رفاقي وبلادي وشبابي كيف لا تصبح أشعاري بنادق I am against my country's revolutionaries hurting even a single ear of corn. I am against a child, any child, having to carry a rifle. I am against my sister learning the anatomy of the gun. I am against what you will. I am against a boy becoming a hero at 10, against the tree bearing bombs instead of fruit, against branches in my garden becoming gallows, against the rose beds turning to trenches. I am against what you will. And yet, after the burning of my land and the burning of my friends and the burning of my youth, how can my poems not become guns? Thank you. Okay, I'm gonna read from my book now so it's less interesting This is since we're on the topic of violence and condemnation and stuff I'm reading this poem called 15 year old girl killed for attempting to kill a soldier with a fruit knife or context Context. Fruit knife to a firearm. He was in her throat. 15-year-old girl denounced. Violence is not children taking on dragons. For me, it has always been apologies. Running to catastrophe with contest. commissioning compassion, turning heroes into humans. This is a refuted revolution. Television said her brother was a martyr, but martyrs go with intent. He went bullet to the head, from fist to flounder. Context is his hand was in his pocket, toy guns. I told the people that day disclaimer that that girl should not have found her rage in the kitchen drawer. She was reaching for crayons. Solidarity often is a refuted revolution. I held my arsenal. People who give excuses for executions fear the rifle more than they fear the reason. I put her in tool, girl to their gaze, angel to their accusations. Otherwise, nail file becomes the villain despite context. Context is they want cats declawed. They want knock doors unanswered. They want the other cheek. Terrorist avenges, headlines delusional. Are all heads equal? Is a soldier's heart equal to her brother's? I'll hold my arsenal. When they ask me about it next time, I'll say God held her hand. Thank you. This next one. I studied in Atlanta back in the day, and there was a grocery store there called Kroger. I wrote this poem about mainstream media. Kroger. I don't have time for an epiphany at the supermarket. Don't have time for an epiphany, and so the epiphany has me. In Atlanta, I stay at Omno's on Lynch Ave. Bitterness in the air. Sin sleeps next to me. I invert the syntax. This is the third night and I want to kiss her back, but they're bullying the network for having me. And so I'm writing emails instead of poems, eating my fist in the bathroom. I don't want to hear about freedom of speech or my hostility. I've been meaning to sleep for a few weeks. I don't have time for paranoia. Won't flip rocks or look for merit in the death threats. If they come for me, let them. I've made my amends. Won't be content in my coffin. It is those stuffing sand in their mouths that worry me most, saying there are softer ways to say this. Thing is, I don't want to be soft. Don't want to humanize shit. Look at my limbs. Look at this earth. I've been meaning to eat today, but I spent a thousand mornings since sunrise insisting upon my integrity. I don't have time for contextualization. The journalist interrupts me. The journalist interrupts this tragedy to negotiate another, a history whose debris is still here. What is a fact in Arabic is debatable in English. contentious. Thing is, if they say evict, I'll still say theft. A reporter asked me whether I believe in violence. Do I believe in violence? Well, I don't believe in violation. Thank you. Okay, this is the last one. On July 16, 2014, Israeli forces killed, Israeli naval fire killed four Palestinian boys as they played soccer on Gaza beach. This was a pretty prominent issue, and obviously they denied it, and then they admitted it, and you know, the playbook. But I wrote this poem about a people whose biggest crime is that they were not born Jewish. This is a poem called No Moses in Siege. Was it because there were no more graves in Gaza that you brought us to the beach to die? Was it because rubbling us in our houses like our cousins, like our futures, like our gods would be a bore? Was it because our cemeteries need cemeteries and our tombstones need homes? Was it because our fathers needed more grief? We were limbs in the wind, our joy breaking against the shore. Soccer in between our feet, we were soccer in between their feet. No place to run, no Moses in siege. On most days we weep in advance. Here we know two sons, Earth's friend and white phosphorus. Here we know two things, death and the few months before it. What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea does not part? What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea does not part? Thank you. There's a poem I really love by an Egyptian poet called Amal Dunqol. And in this poem he says, . he says i hang from the gallows in the morning and my forehead is lowered by death because alive i did not lower it what he is saying in this poem is that those who refuse to bow down will be punished, and those who bury their heads in the sand will be spared. Even in Arabic we say, This is a logic that is felt deeply across the country. The Arab American Institute just released a survey that said that 67% of Arab Americans feel fear to express solidarity with the Palestinian people. And I imagine this fear is felt across different communities. It has consumed us. It has infested our classrooms, our newsrooms, our synagogues, our mosques, our churches. It's all around us. And so people are afraid. They're intimidated into silence. They want to keep their jobs. They want to keep their academic prospects. But I'm reminded of something Audre Lorde once said, that your silence will not protect you. And this is... And this has become so tragically evident in the past three days. A Palestinian family was attacked and stabbed dozens and dozens of times in the safety of their living room for simply being Palestinian. A Muslim woman in Chicago was attacked as she sat on a park bench and killed for simply being Muslim. The violence that is being waged on the Palestinian people in Gaza will have effects on all of us. And if we allow them to intimidate us and silence us, we will be crushed. We must speak out collectively because together they cannot crush us. Now, and it's hard to say the sentence, but now is not the time for despair. As the death toll mounts, now is not the time for despair. And now is not the time for fear. Because any fear we may have will never compare to the fear of watching the chandelier in your living room shake violently seconds before your entire building trembles above your head. So this is a moment for courage for all of us. So I invite you all and I invite myself to be courage. Thank you so much. Last I heard, Rifat was still under the rubble. You know, such a sentence should not be meant literally. But there is no metaphor or hyperbole here. There is no poetry in this sentence. Rifat is... still under the rubble, and he isn't alone in this suffocation. Thousands in Gaza remain buried in debris, but airplanes still take flight, people still travel, and what's worse is that the birds still migrate. I checked this morning. I'm told it's blasphemous to ask God... I'm told it's blasphemous to ask why God has yet to show face, but it's hard to keep a faith that hasn't kept my people. Rifat is still under the rubble, and I don't think I understand the heft of such a sentence. They say there are seven stages of grief, and thus far all seven of them have been disbelief. If I stand here and read an obituary, if I told you that Rifat Al-Ara'ir was a poet and professor born in 79 from Ghazal Shujaiya who earned his BA in English from the Islamic University of Gaza, which by the way was completely destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, and his masters from UCL here in London, which by the way has refused to comment on his assassination. And he also, it looks like you're viewing me okay. He also earned his PhD and co-founded New York Numbers and co-edited Gaza Writes Back, and, and, and, and, and, was one of the few sending us fragments of news and analysis despite the media blackout, and, and, and. If I stand here and read an obituary, if I decorate this eulogy with kindness, words with a kind of shiny adjectives we only gift our friends after they have died i would be doing us all a disservice after all this is a man that loved to cuss and joke even when the bombs dropped he gave us laughter and perhaps indulge me especially as the bombs dropped he gave us laughter so i'm not going to indulge in meaningless good taste because he gave us laughter, thunderous laughter, when the world ordered us to shrink and whisper. When Israeli propagandists made a ridiculous claim that Palestinian fighters had baked a baby in the oven, Which, by the way, Israeli military has denied itself, since many of you would love to hear it from the horse's mouth. Rifat joked on Twitter and he said, with or without baking powder. And many people use that against him as some kind of indictment, but to me that is so courageous and so funny and so human to be able... to be able... to be able to joke in the face of so much insidiousness. I mean, the claim made about baking a baby in the oven is so insidious because it invoked a real crime that took place during the Dariusine massacre. It replicated, it replicated the testimonies of eyewitnesses who saw Zionist soldiers throw a father and his son in an oven. What do you do with so much insidiousness? Rifat satirized it. I also don't want to sit here and draw a perfect victim portrait because perfect victims are boring and impossible. And Rifat was so courageous and funny and interesting and full of humanity. And when we try to conjure up perfect victims, we are shrinking the scope of humanity for everybody around us. when we try to dictate who is and who isn't mournable, who can we and who can't we grieve with, when we emphasize the death of women and children as though the death of our men is not our birth. We are shrinking the scope of humanity for everybody else. So to leave you, I just want to invite everybody in this room to be a little bit more courageous, to be a little bit more human, to be a little bit more flawed, to satirize and ridicule and make fun, because there's nothing more precious than laughter. And we can't let this storm pass us by. We can't just be bystanders in this genocide. We all have an active role to play. Right there, over there, there are subjected to a genocide but here we are at war and each of us has an active role to play thank you so much there's so many people talking about gaza there's so many people so many writers so many journalists so many academics talking about gaza And even I, I grew up in Jerusalem, it's about an hour and a half drive, and I talk about Gaza a lot. I talk about how it's an open air prison. Sometimes people even say that it's a concentration camp, how there is two million people besieged, blockaded without the ability to leave, to go anywhere without the right to movement, without access to clean water, how Gaza has been declared uninhabitable by the United Nations. And I say this, and I repeat this, I say they've been under siege for 16 years. And I repeat the fact that there is, that half of the population is children, and that these children have witnessed not one, not two, but sometimes three and four and five wars. and I spit out this word uninhabitable, but I don't necessarily think about what the word uninhabitable means. So before I try to even go there, I want to talk to you about my own background. I grew up in a neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem. called Sheikh Jarrah. And my childhood, like many childhoods in Palestine, has been marked by land theft. Settler organizations that are registered in the United States, that are registered as tax exempt, claimed my house as their own by divine decree. And instead of having the local authorities recognize this as absolutely ludicrous and ridiculous, they in fact aided and abetted them. They offered them legal help. They offered them cover. And this is how it was reported on in the media, that there was a real estate dispute between Jewish people and Arabs in this neighborhood called Sheikh Jarrah, where the Arabs were simply evicted. In 2009, I was coming home from school. It was about 10 a.m. and I saw all of our furniture scattered across the length of our streets. And, you know, there weren't many men there because it's 10 a.m. It was mostly like the grandmothers and the older aunts who stay at home. they were all gathered in our house and they were weeping and they were crying and I saw I remember I saw blood on the ground and I saw that the settlers had through a big big TV one of those old TVs at my grandmother and she had gone to the hospital and I saw hundreds of police officers hundreds of armed settlers take over half of our home and this in the headlines was reported on as simply Now I'm not trying to imply that evictions are not violent, right? I live in New York City half of the year and I see how gentrification and this kind of eviction wages a lot of violence on black and brown communities. But what I'm trying to say is that eviction does not capture the violent militarism of the forced expulsions that we were facing in Sheikh Jarrah. And this kind of violence that I was subjected to at a very young age and the corresponding erasure from diplomats and media people resulted in a lot of pain and a lot of grief and I think above all a lot of anger, a lot of rage. I came here to the United States when I was 18 to study, and I recognized I was a bit different from my peers. I have very intense emotional reactions to many things. And I thought this was characteristic of all people everywhere. But it turns out it was just characteristic of my city. There's a lot of violence. exerted on us and so we are explosive often and this is just in jerusalem right you have these settler based organizations sorry american-based organizations of settlers who cite the bible and cite god and say that our property is theirs to take despite having lived there our whole lives And then you grow up and you come to find out that these courts are built by settlers to ensure the protection of settlers and to ensure that settlers get as much land as possible. It's like almost like asking the fox to guard the hen house, right? Trying to find justice in the Israeli judiciary. And it wasn't just me. It was all of our neighborhood. And it wasn't just my generation. My grandmother had been displaced from her home in 1948, thrown in the street upon the establishment of the Israeli state. Many of her family members were massacred by Zionist militias that later merged and formed what we know now as the Israeli military. And many Palestinians were displaced, 100,000 Palestinians, and many were killed. About 15,000 Palestinians were killed, and now we have 6 million Palestinian refugees around the world. Now, if you take a 10-minute walk from my neighborhood, you go to another neighborhood called Silwan. In Silouan, you have people who are being kicked out of their homes or having their homes demolished because they built their homes without permit. And if you're reading the news, you would think, well, it's unfortunate that they built their homes without permit. It's unfortunate that they're losing their homes, but they shouldn't have built their homes without permit. What the news will not tell you is that 94% of building permit applications submitted by Palestinians in Jerusalem are rejected. And almost 99% in the West Bank are rejected. What the news will not tell you either is that the very guy that was for many years responsible for accepting and rejecting these permits his name was jonathan yusef he's a prominent settler activist who would march around our neighborhood chanting we want nakba now we want nakba now we want nakba now and as as you know the nakba is refers to the uh violent ethnic cleansing of palestinians and so when you Compare what happened to my family, our neighborhood, what's continuing to happen in Silwan, and what happened to my grandmother's generation, you recognize that the Nakba is an ongoing structure, it wasn't an event. Now, if we want to just take one more example, we can go to Hebron, to the South Hebron Hills, where Bedouin communities, cave dwellers have lived there and cultivated their lands for generations. Just last year, about 1,300 of them were expelled, or at least the Supreme Court has ruled to expel them. And we are hearing in the past month, excuse me, as the assault on Gaza intensifies. We were hearing in the last month about more and more villages that are being depopulated in the South Hebron Hills. And again, if you're watching the news, you would read this headline, Palestinians living in a firing zone. were evicted from the firing zone. And you would think to yourself, it's unfortunate that these Palestinians were evicted from their homes, but why would they build their homes in a firing zone? And what the news will not tell you is that the Israeli government in the 80s, under Ariel Sharon, designated their lands as firing zones, as off-limit military zones, for the sole purpose of expelling them And this is not just me speculating, even though I tend to be right often, it's not a conspiracy theory. This has been revealed through declassified documents from the Israeli state archive that these lands were declared military zones for the sole purpose of expelling Palestinians. And Palestinians in the South Herbon Hills not only face this land theft and dispossession, but they face very brutal settler and military violence. And every other day we hear about a shepherd being killed by a settler. We hear about a farmer being killed by a soldier. In 2022, I was living in Brooklyn with my roommate. I was studying. I remember I woke up one day and my roommate who is from the South Heron Hills had just heard the news that her cousin was shot in the neck by the Israeli military who wanted to take over his electric generator because they were not allowing people to have electric equipment. And they shot him in the neck and he continues to be paralyzed from the neck down, unable to speak. And these are little stories that contain a magnitude of loss that we hear about every single day. Every single day. And seldom do they make the headlines. And if they do make the headlines, they are devout not just of context. They are often devout of the truth. The kind of displacement that I went through in the occupied eastern part of Jerusalem has made me, you know, very fluent in English, but it has also made me flippant. It has made me angry. It has made me have trust issues. I have a lot of, you know, mental health issues that I can guarantee you exist across the spectrum in occupied Palestine, right? So everywhere you look on the map, there is a story of dispossession. There is a constant and relentless Nakba that a Palestinian family is being forced to confront often on their own. And people like myself are often forced to turn into one person media ministries where they have to persuade an often hostile TV reporter to believe that the broken arm that I have right here is indeed broken. the bruise that I have on my neck is indeed real and that the fact that this family member of mine has been killed was a true story and not a fabrication and that this footage was not manipulated and this happens in in in against the backdrop of severe demonization of Palestinians of demonization we are not We're not just not allowed self-defense or resistance. We are not even allowed a basic human reaction, right? Now I say all of this to say, to go back to the first point, is that I was born in Jerusalem. And it's only an hour and a half away from the Gaza Strip. And the Gaza Strip, to me, feels like a far away planet. I am the Palestinian correspondent for The Nation magazine. I am culture editor at Mondewise magazine. And I have been wrestling, trying to come up with one article about the matter, trying to fulfill my contractual obligations with my employers, who just texted me right now. Trying to come up with just one article, trying to summarize what we're seeing, and I cannot, despite the proximity, despite being of the same national background, it's hard to imagine. And I want us to consider that a lot of those people who have been writing about the Gaza Strip have been doing so from their expensive apartments. And when they look outside of their windows, there is not white phosphorus, right? They write from rooms where the chandeliers never shake moments before the building trembles and falls and is completely destroyed. They don't write from internet cafes where there are young men who are haunted by suicidal ideation and aborted potential. They don't write their children's names on their children's arms right and what I'm trying to say what I'm trying to say is that we don't we simply just do not understand we simply do not know what life inside the Gaza Strip in particular does to a person what violence the violence of being besieged begets We don't know the consequences, the material, the muscular, and the mental consequences of, you know, I'll give you a story. This Palestinian photojournalist named Ali Zadallah is holding his phone like this and then he pans his camera to the back seat and in the back seat there lies his lifeless father wrapped in a white cloth and he goes to bury his father by himself he says because there are no ambulances and nobody to help with the burial and then he gets on TV within the next hour to talk to an Egyptian reporter about the fact that his sister still remains under the rubble, but the bulldozer had had to go to another building to try to rescue other people who might be alive. We do not know what goes on in the mind of a nurse whose shift at the hospital is interrupted by the body of her husband or the body of her daughter on a stretcher. We simply do not know. And one of the images that continues to haunt me is the father is the father that carried what remains of his son in two separate plastic bags saying, you know, this is my son and this is what remains of him. And you wonder what happens to that father when the cameras are gone. What happens to that father after all of this death? What happens? What happens to those children that grew up with this horror? What becomes of them? We have to talk about Gaza Within this context, and it's not to water down anything or justify anything, but this is not just a footnote. This context is not just a footnote. It is material and real and most of us in this room have never experienced it and will never experience it. And we cannot just cast it aside. This is a place that is governed solely by its severed geography. You know, people there are encircled by an abundance that, in my opinion, I think they are owed. And what I mean by this is that a lot of these people in Gaza, two-thirds in fact, are refugees who are forced out from the lands where now Israeli settlements and Israeli towns stand. That is not a minor detail. It's also not a minor detail that everybody in the Gaza Strip is a man. I know that sounds like a jarring statement to say, but they are treated as though they are just men. The children are men, the women are men, and the girls are men too. They are treated as such by the Israeli military, they are treated as such by Western media, and they are even treated as such within their own self-interpretation because they know that there is no laws of war that apply to them, that they are targeted indiscriminately and often targeted very, very, very intentionally. They all seem from a sniper's eye view to be plotting some kind of operation. So it's easy to talk about Gaza, it's easy to talk about the geopolitical context and to talk about it and to cast it off as this kind of marginal issue But it's not just a marginal issue. When we say that there's been over 11,000 Palestinians who have been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli shelling, it's not just a number. This is a level of loss that we all must contend with. Three, four days ago, I joined a group of hundreds of journalists and writers who decided to occupy the lobby of the New York Times building in protest of the New York Times complicity in Israel's genocidal war against the Gaza Strip. And one of the things that they did was they printed a mock New York Times newspaper with the names of the martyrs. It took us over an hour and a half to get through the first page, trying to recite the names of those killed on the first page. And most of them were not even one years old. And when you're reading those names one by one, there is a physical reaction that forces you to stop and contend with all of this loss, all of these lives that were lost. I know it sounds like a cliche to say, but they are truly not numbers. They are people who had dreams and hopes and flaws and negative qualities and sometimes regressive politics, sometimes amazing progressive politics. Sometimes they were not good people. Sometimes they're great people. Sometimes they were just complicated and they deserved life and freedom and liberty and dignity no matter what. This is not a minor detail. So I invite all of you to not cast judgment against the people of Gaza, because when you put people in a pressure cooker, when you put people in a pressure cooker, they are out to explode. I'm not a human rights law expert. I'm not an expert in anything, but I think all of us in this room are expert in one thing, which is natural human reactions. I know that all of us in this room have a very similar answer. or can imagine a very similar answer to the question that I will pose to you now. Let's just go with me. Let's just go with my story. If somebody, if a foreign military that had no business being in your neighborhood in the first place came and took over your home through your family in the street, your furniture in the street, rendered you homeless, forced you to live in the street, and said they did so with divine decree and under the protection and the help of a judiciary, what would you do? Would you not fight back? Now, let's take it up a notch, not to create a hierarchy of suffering, but I certainly know that if I ever had to go retrieve what remains of my child, from the rubble and put him in separate plastic bags that I will be filled with rage. And how can I not be? when the world turns a blind eye to my suffering? How can I not be when all of the rules that apply to everyone do not apply to me? Possibly because we are people of color, because we're Arab, because we're racialized as Muslim even though not all of us are Muslim. Possibly also because of who our oppressors are and because of the horrors that our oppressors endured, not all of them obviously, But the horrors that our oppressors endured that the Israeli state then exploits to justify my oppression. How can I not be horrified?