Innocent Palestinians Forced From Their Homes, Survivor Speaks Out

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1:32All right, joining me today is Mohamed El-Kurd. He is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and writer. He's an editor-at-large at Mondeweiss and the first Palestine correspondent at The Nation magazine. His most recent book, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, is out now, and he brought me my very own copy. Mohamed, you were born and grew up in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. When you were 11 years old, half of your home was taken over under an Israeli court order. What happened? Did you have to share your house? Yeah, I mean, share is kind of an amicable word. It was, you know, we were forced to live in half of our home.

2:20The other half was taken by settlers. But to kind of paint an image, I want to say, as absurd as it sounds, this is a reality that many, many, many thousands of Palestinians live with. Our house and our neighborhood received so much media attention because we live in such a central neighborhood that was surrounded by all these international embassies and consulates. So all these diplomats would watch us be constantly brutalized and terrorized by the Israeli military from their balconies. So our house and our neighborhood became the center of attention. But what happened was all of our families in our neighborhood, 28 families, they were all dispossessed, forcibly expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba.

2:58And then they were given these houses by the United Nations. And in the 70s, there were settler organizations, Jewish American charities actually registered here as charities who have sued us claiming our houses are are their own with falsified document by divine decree saying that god hang on i have to ask some questions yes please so your family owned a home yes and then a court an israeli court said you don't own this house anymore yes in the 70s and we in the 70s and then that where were these people from that came in and lived in half of your house the guy in half of my house is from Long Island his name is more questions so a person from Long Island New York yes can go to Israel yes and if they're Jewish okay if they're Jewish I couldn't do that no you could not do it and say I want this house and who's the boss of who whose house that is who decides this why do they think somebody from new york gets to go take your family's home explain this to me like i'm five well i think let me it's pretty incest incestuous let me paint you a picture i mean we we hear words like the court and the judicial system and and eviction and legal and we we imbue these words with so much authority but what happens is these courts are built by Israeli settlers, right?

4:24The laws, the ethnic cleansing is written into the law. So I have been displaced from my home in accordance to Israeli laws and procedures and protocols. The guy that displaced me, yeah, is a settler himself. To paint you even a more cartoonish picture, I grew up watching this guy called Yonatan Youssef walk around the neighborhood with a megaphone in his hand, chanting the most racist Islamophobic shit against us. This guy was a sitting city councilman who approved and rejected housing building permit applications. For example, in Jerusalem, where I'm from, in occupied Jerusalem, if you want to build a home and you're a Palestinian, your chance of getting approved for building a home is less than 1%.

5:15So they control how much homes we get to build, and then they can come up and conjure up whatever fake documents to destroy the homes we already live in. I have a question. I thought Israel was a democracy. That's democracy in the area. So you're telling me that you didn't have the same rights as other people? Because I've been told this my whole life. You tell me that's a lie. No, it's not a democracy. I think anybody with the least bit of critical thought is able to tell it's not a democracy. I mean, even for Palestinians who own Israeli, who have Israeli citizenship, there's a myriad, dozens and dozens of laws that explicitly discriminate against them.

5:56And if you even look at the Israeli nation state law in the Israeli constitution, or what would be their constitution, the Israeli state law, it enshrines Jewish settlement as a national value to promote. This is written in the state law. This word settlement bothers me, settler, because it sounds quaint. Yeah, it sounds. let's go settle in for the night and and watch the nba game yeah or let's watch um you know love story on hulu together and you'd be like all right jennifer that sounds fun we'll settle in so it sounds like this quaint thing but in your instance some mf are from new york goes i'm sure all expenses paid trip yeah to jerusalem and once they get into your house they're living in half of it Yeah.

6:41And you're 11. They're expelling us from our house with the help of the military and the police. How are they treating you, these New Yorkers? I mean, with absolute brutality. We grew up witnessing the most egregious, horrific settler violence. And you're right. Settler is such a quaint word. It is really colonial violence that we have experienced, right? It sounds more like terrorists than a settler to me personally. I have two sons and 11 years old, all ages are very vulnerable. 11 years old child, it's before hormones, but really can pretty much figure life out. And I can't imagine how traumatizing and terrorizing that would be to see your parents so scared and feel powerless and you hurt for yourself.

7:31But it's a really difficult position to be in as a child when you see your parents scared. It really kind of fucks with you a little bit because your parents have always been kind of the rock. Explain to me and to my listeners and viewers what kind of trauma that is. And I know it's personal, but I think it's important because it's happening right now. And I'm from Oklahoma originally. People from rural Oklahoma are subsidizing this type of thing and happening. So explain to me what that was like for you when these people come in and hostily take over your home. where you live as a family with your parents.

8:10I think there's an amazing thing. I mean, absolutely, it is very horrific and traumatizing, but it's when things happen collectively, when they are happening in mass, you really don't realize how absurd and abnormal they are until you leave. It wasn't until I was 16 that I realized that it's not normal to be strip searched each time you leave your house. It wasn't until I was 14 that I realized, oh, police are not supposed to be this brutal. It wasn't, you know, and that kind of like collective experience builds a certain camaraderie. And Palestinian people have managed to remain resilient despite all of this.

8:48Another thing also I should say is that the Israelis have been quite genius in their divide and conquer strategy. Because in our, in Jerusalem, what we deal with is home expulsions and home demolitions. Whereas in the West Bank, people deal with the loss of freedom of movement. They have to deal with settler pogroms. Their villages get set on fire. Whereas in the Gaza Strip, people are dealing with literal bombs and living for days and weeks under the rubble before they die. Right. So there's this kind of hierarchy of violence that makes each of us say, oh, this is as bad as it is. It's not so bad because I at least have it a little bit less crazy than my neighbor.

9:32and that makes it impossible to really reckon with the scope of the violence. You know, I think Palestinians at large are very stunted. And I think it's a coping mechanism because how can you? How can you not have any rights? How can you not have any ability to fight back or resist without being maligned and terrorized? You know, how can you cope with that? It's really stunning. I read an article about a doctor who went to Gaza and he was helping people. And he just said it really broke him. The way, the suffering, the death, the, you know, so many children, if they haven't been killed, they're amputees.

10:14And it's really devastating as we all sit here and we're all told a bunch of stuff. Like my whole life, I was told, you know, Israel is a big democracy. So I'm like, I support democracy. That sounds good. Well, all the people around them are terrorists. I'm like, well, God, 9-11 was fucked up. Those people are bad. And meanwhile, I'm working on living in the Bible Belt, dealing with Christian nationalists and all sorts of things, right? And now as we see, and the truth is coming out as to what's happening to your people, to your homeland, and it is objectively a genocide. I find it very offensive that when you express empathy for Palestinians, it's suggested that you're a bigot.

11:01I think that is a really diabolical form of gaslighting. It's gaslighting. That is really irritating me. I want to ask you this. There's big questions that everybody always asks politicians. Yeah. Does Israel have a right to exist? No. And then the one thing they say is, does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state? What does that mean? Well, let's talk first of all about the question itself. What does the question even mean? It makes no fucking sense, right? Does Texas exist? Yeah, does anything have a right to exist? Human beings have a right. But the idea, this is, by the way, the history of the question, does Israel have a right to exist, is a question formulated by the now defunct Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

11:46And it is launched at people like you and me to distract us from talking about the focal point. So you could be talking about genocide or children being murdered or people being thrown from their homes. And the journalist or the diplomat will ask you, does Israel first, I have to set the terms of engagement before anything else. Do you believe? And so the whole conversation is derailed. And now we're talking about rights for countries that do not exist, like the rights that do not exist for countries. So the whole question is a non-starter and it's meant, like the function of it is meant to be as a distraction.

12:20So I'm very impressed and pleased when people are able to just say, this is not a priority right now, right? And also, no state has a right to exist, particularly no, I don't want to live in a theological state. I don't want to live under religious rule, right? I don't want - Yeah, and that's not a controversial thing to say. But I think people who are confronted with this question, what should be what would be most helpful for them is to redirect and focus on the important thing. Because, you know, in debate terms and in the world of debate, does Israel have a right to exist is a red herring.

12:56Right. So it's a fallacy of debate. Well, I always think when I hear that, like, well, does Oklahoma have a right to exist? It used to be Indian territory. that's where the, you know, the Europeans that came over, it pushed all the Indians to Oklahoma, because they were like, Oklahoma sucks, y 'all can have that land. And then the people in Kansas were like, well, we want that land. So it exists. Oklahoma exists. I raised my kids there. I own a house there. I love the Oklahoma City Thunder. It exists. And so then if people were to say, does Oklahoma have a right to exist as a Christian nation, which nobody would ever ask, does Oklahoma have a right to exist?

13:36The only you ever hear is with Israel. And Israel exists. I don't know what to do about it. The water's out of the bottle. But then it gets to, does Israel have a right to exist as a Jewish state? So I have questions for you about this. I'm an atheist. I do not like any sort, whether it's Muslim, Jewish, Christian. I think a lot of people that think the same way living together cook up a lot of bad ideas. For sure. That's my opinion like look at the suburbs and american cities right all white all bad ideas yeah so does israel have a right to exist as a jewish state does that mean that if i decided i wanted to move to israel this great democracy as they pitch it would i have rights no you would not have non non-jews would not be full equal citizens in israel but my family who's lived there for many many generations for decades and decades and decades, we're all over the place in the diaspora.

14:31Some families in Jordan, some families in Kuwait, because we've all been expelled and we can't ever come back. But any Jewish person, they could be born in the Philippines and have no ties whatsoever. They can just apply and get citizenship and live in Palestinian houses. You know what I mean? With premier rights. Yes, with premier rights. Health care. Higher education. Health care that Americans pay for, by the way. They would be tried in civil courts while we're tried in military courts. It's the most absurd cartoonish. It's the colonial world that Americans read about in high school. It still exists.

15:09It still exists on steroids. is sometimes when I first came to this country, I would tell people my experience living under Israeli rule. And I felt almost ridiculous saying it because it sounded so cartoonishly evil that I wondered if people thought I was lying. But thank God we have an abundance, an abundance of evidence. But again, the question about whether Israel has a right to exist is just about putting you in cross-examination, making you defend yourself, removing Israel from the place of scrutiny and making your character, whether you're a bigot or you're a racist or whatever that's now what's under investigation and we're no longer talking about israel but israel is what it does right zionism is what it does people can define zionism in whatever ways they want but zionism in its most recent crystallization is genocide it's a genocidal ideology and that's why it must be rejected this is i think how we can escape these debates you know that derail us from the focal point by looking at things materially.

16:10Zionism is a racist, colonial, expansionist, brutal terrorist project. And I'm not saying that because I'm citing the Zionist pioneers who have said this in their early works when they wrote about it explicitly. And I'm not saying it because of my opinion. It's because the evidence is everywhere you look. You know, the evidence is everywhere you look. It's indisputable that it's... And they want now the... It's my understanding that they want the Greater Israel Project. Yeah. And on the idea of soldiers, they have a badge that expands the map of the existing footprint of Israel, which is why you see, I think we're up to 2 million people in Lebanon that are displaced, residential areas getting carpet bombed, people expelled, if not killed.

16:57I've read an article about like dropping white phosphorus on civilian populations. um and then obviously i think iran is because they want to balkanize that area because israel has no natural resources and once you see this shit like i spent my whole life like oh my god the middle east that's fucked up yeah and it seemed very complicated and so by design so far off right and once you see it you can't really unsee it and then once you see how powerful the propaganda is with both political parties here it's even more diabolical i mean and then it's just like what the fuck is actually going on it's amazing to me how this government israel gets away with this shit it's unbelievable and then it's like now it's like oh it's just been Benjamin Netanyahu.

17:56No. It's like, it's a much bigger problem than that. Genocide is not a one man show. Right. And just like with Trump, if Trump dies, we still have a dipshit problem in America. We still have a fascist problem in America. 100%. You know, it's not a one man issue. And so. Netanyahu's approval rating is through the roof, you know, is, is Israelis are so, but But this is, I think there's just a problem with the whole logic. This is a nation that has built up its military capabilities, and yet it pretends constantly that it's on the brink of extension. They raise their students to believe that every, they say we live in a bad neighborhood.

18:41Israelis have either really public or really secret peace agreements with almost all of their Arab neighbors, and yet they say we live in a bad neighborhood. right they have gas agreements with Jordan they have disagreements with Egypt they have a peace agreement with the UAE and whatever and the other and yet they tell everybody we live in a bad neighborhood and everybody wants to kill us at any time so you're living you have the nukes and you have the military uh support and you have the diplomatic and economic cover from the U.S. and you have all of these capabilities and yet you're constantly living in this like siege mentality where you believe you're on the brink of extension and so that harbors a certain mentality, a certain like victim mentality that's like, in my opinion, akin to psychosis.

19:22It's like the biggest question I ask myself all the time is that can people's minds be changed? People who have been so indoctrinated because they see the evidence, but they reject it. They reject what they hear. They reject what they see. And so it's hard to tell. I do think that, I can't speak for other people, but I can speak for middle Americans. I do think that their minds can be changed, but there's two avenues that they can go down. There's one, which is like Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, America First people. And they are using the Palestine issue to say they're killing Christians in Palestine.

20:09and they're spending our money and they get free health care and that's not America first and your tax dollars shouldn't pay for that. Where I come from, Mohammed, that's going to hit hard. That is going to be a very powerful message. A problem I personally have with that is because I understand white Christian nationalism because I grew up around it. They feel the exact same way about homosexuals, trans people, immigrants that they claim Palestinians feel, you know, with the, oh, they're going to throw them off the roof. They throw gays off the roof and all this stuff. I'm like, sounds like the gays are getting killed by the Israelis to me, but call me crazy.

20:45But, so I worry about, but nonetheless, whichever route it goes, I think the dam is broken. I think the dam regarding Israel, now they've drug us into this war that Marco Rubio on State department has acknowledged that benjamin not you know who drug us into war in iran and i think the dam is broken and i think what we're seeing right now is you're going to see you know jonathan greenblatt of the adl bedwetting all over the place just goes bananas all the time and um they're watering down this anti-semitism is real and i i i hate all forms of bigotry but also the The biggest problem I see in America right now is anti-black racism.

21:29It is the fundamental problem in this country because we just removed black representation from the south. And this is far more pressing to me than anti-Semitism. But your analysis material, what you just touched on is that you're looking at the world through a material. You're looking at facts and what's actually happening materially. But what happens in this country specifically and in the West largely is that we focus so much on words and language and oh is from the river to the sea it's from the river to the sea anti-semitic or does israel have a right to exist and we're not talking about real things like you said right you know black people in the south have no representation palestinians are being killed but it's it's really a masterful trap they have set up for us where we're constantly drug into speaking about rhetorical and semantics and blah blah instead of talking about systemic procedural policy-driven violence yeah benjamin netanyahu always says uh uh iran says death to america and i'm like so what i mean they they're enemies for 40 years they've said death to america and they haven't done jack shit are you that triggered by that also what does he iran and america are enemies does he expect iran to chant i love america like what i don't know it's just it's so ridiculous and you're right because they frame it by all of these words and then the river to the sea i watched this whole like mini documentary on my phone the other night and it was the israelis were saying it from the river to the sea and so it's like you can't have it both ways but aside from all aside from all of that insanity let's talk about um nicholas christoph's piece in the new york times detailing the rape of prisoners by israeli forces and this has caused a massive zionist meltdown they were protesting in front of the new york times benjamin netanyahu's bed wedding he says i'm going to sue the new york times i'm sure jonathan greenblatt is just on a you know 24-hour tear bender texting everybody he knows god only knows what he's up to how do you feel seeing this after mainstream media's complicity and whitewashing and demonization of palestinian victims and martyring of israelis deaths what how do you feel about nicholas Christophe's piece?

23:46I think the most revealing thing, first of all, as you said, the rape of Palestinian prisoners, and honestly, the most horrific accounts that you read, we've been reading them for a year and a half, if not two years. They've been reported on by Mondewise, Middle East Eye, Al Jazeera, many, many, many, and they've largely been ignored by the likes of the New York Times, while the likes of the New York Times have published, you know, the widely discredited, wildly debunked screams without words article. But the most revealing thing about the article is that it was relegated to the opinion section, right?

24:21Much like the article about the Israeli soldiers using Palestinians as human shields, it was put in the opinion section, much like the article about the Israeli snipers targeting Palestinian children in the head and the doctors who went and recorded it, it was relegated to the opinion section. Words from the IDF, words from the Israeli military, words from the Israeli politicians and governments and policymakers, they're all treated as facts. They're put at the very top of the article in the prominent first page news section. And facts and genocide is relegated to a matter of debate and a matter of opinion.

24:52It's buried. But I want to talk a little bit more about the systemic involvement of the New York Times, right? Because there's one thing to be complicit and turn a blind eye and obfuscate and not report things or use passive voice. I mean, I remember this like a crazy, a crazy, there was a time when Israel bombed a cafe in Gaza. This is like 2014. And the headline was like, cafe goers find themselves poised for tragedy. That was the headline. I've seen this kind of shit. It's insane. It's crazy. But beyond the obfuscation and the redlining and talking out the sides of their mouths, correspondents that are currently reporting on the matter, on Israel, on Palestine, have direct ties to the Israel.

25:42Isabel Krishner, two of her sons served in the Israeli military while she's actively reporting on us. Her husband works at a think tank whose job explicitly stated is to enhance the image of Israel in the Western world. And she reports for the Times. Ronan Bergman worked in the Israeli military intelligence, and he's reporting at the Times, and the examples are countless. So it's not just complicity of bad editorial standards, but there is literally material ties that the New York Times and other mainstream papers have to the State of Israel. Meanwhile, if a Palestinian journalist, let alone comment or like a post that is misconstrued in any way that shows them as biased, they're immediately fired.

26:27Arabs and Muslims are literally, I hear this from people at the New York Times and people other, Arabs and Muslims are literally prevented from reporting on the matter because they're told they're too attached to it. They're too emotional about it. They're activists, whatever. Meanwhile, people whose sons, who they themselves have served in the Israeli military can report on it without any scrutiny. It's insane. It's completely insane. And also when you pile on the fact that, first, I want to say that story about the kids getting sniped, BBC, Al Jazeera and others reported it. Doctors saw the MRIs, very substantiated, rock solid factual reporting.

27:07The head and the heart, that was the one where I was just like, they're assassinating little kids. They're assassinating, like sniping little kids. That was for me, like just a complete changing moment for me. Not changing because I didn't have an opinion to change. It was a threshold. Yes, it was very eye-opening. But then when you find out that, I think it's 260 journalists is the last count. Maybe you know the most current one. But the last I heard is 260 journalists, fewer American citizens that have been killed by Israel. And then you think about people who are journalists and their loyalties are to a genocidal, war criminal, homicidal regime over their fucking fellow workers.

27:55There's such a moral rot to that. It is so morally rotten. Because I'm so loyal. Like one of my best traits is I'm fiercely loyal. I'm fiercely loyal to my friends and to my family. And I do not understand that type of disloyalty to your coworkers, disloyalty to facts, disloyalty to integrity, to the truth. And I feel like there is a through line with the moral rot that we're experiencing here. When I find out that politicians, when I lived in Oklahoma, that were Democrats, that are Democrats, and I thought, well, they're so liberal. These people are great people. and I'm speaking about like Cory Booker or Chuck Schumer.

28:41When you're a woman that lives in a red state where there's a total abortion ban and the politicians are crazy Christian nationalists, you're trying to put the Bibles in schools and all this crazy shit. You hear somebody like Cory Booker or Chuck Schumer speak and you're like, oh my God, these people are amazing. Yeah. Because the politicians in the backdrop of where I live are horrible, right? Horrible, right? So then you find out like what did it for me was after Kamala lost, why aren't they fighting? Why are they voting for Kristi Noem or Little Marco? Why are they confirming all these people?

29:16Why aren't they fighting this guy? And then you really start digging into it and you realize they take a bunch of APEC money. And I just feel like taking money from those types of organizations has to break you. And then it just breaks every other component of your life. And the through line is like, our politicians that are voting to support that they are way more plugged in to top intel of course then they know what they're doing yes they know what they're doing and they're okay with that i mean the racism against arabs and muslims in this country is so so so so rampant and so institutionalized it's it's unbelievable but i think i don't think the democratic party has a chance of survival if they don't change course on Palestine.

30:03You know, it is absolutely atrocious that Donald Trump is in power. It is. But Kamala's loss should serve as a lesson, you know. And we've understood from like intel that was recently released that her stance on Gaza has really hurt her chances of winning. But what Democrats do is that they cater to a non-existent voter. They want to hold two things at once and the Zionists are mad at them and we're mad at them and they need to move on Palestinian because that's where the majority is people I think across the board in America even people who don't know are I think more and I think polls polls verify this I think people are more pro-Palestinian because it's it's it's not hard to make up your mind once you open you even the headline could be whatever it is and they could obfuscate it in however way they want and they can talk about it in the passive voice and they could the pictures speak for themselves yes and to put it this is going to sound very american of me but americans were our our culture is predicated a lot on film and one thing that we've done really well is films hollywood and it's a part of our cultural identity.