Mohammed El-Kurd: Palestine | Lex Fridman Podcast #391

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, um, decades and decades later, with no shame, with no introspection, uh, with no reflection. That's, no one has the right to do that. No one has the right to keep an entire population of people in a cage, uh, which is what's happening to people in the West Bank, who have no freedom of fo- uh, 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. Um, no one has a right to do that.

The following is a conversation with Mohammed 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. 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. 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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Mohammed el-Kurd. Tell me about Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood in East Jerusalem where you grew up.

Sheikh Jarrah is, you know, in a, in a way, a typical neighborhood despite the, despite the absurd reality that surrounds it. It's a typical neighborhood in terms of Palestinian neighborhoods as 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, uh, were expelled from their homes in the Nakba in 1948, and they were forced out by the Haganah and other, uh, Zionist paramilitaries that later formed the Israeli military. Um, 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, uh, refugee housing unit, uh, by the United Nations and by the Jordanian government which had, which had control over that part of Jerusalem at the, 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. And then in the '70s, you had settler organizations, um, 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 because, obviously because the judges are Israeli and the laws were written by Israeli settlers and the whole judiciary was established, uh, atop the ra- the rubble of our homes and villages, we had no, you know, we had no real pull in the courts. The Israeli courts would look at the Israeli documents, which we argue are falsified and fabricated, um, 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. 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, um, or a real estate dispute as the Israeli f- Ministry of Foreign Affairs likes to frame it, but rather a very, very political battle, one that is about, um, social engineering, one that is about demographics, one that is about removing as many Palestinians as possible from occupied Jerusalem. Um, so we did what all Palestinian families in Jerusalem do when they're faced with this kind of threat, and we bought time. We, we pleaded and pleaded and appealed the courts and appealed the cases and we got over 50 expulsion orders. Um, in 2009, rifle-wielding settlers accompanied by police and Israeli military came over and shoved our neighbors out- outside of their home around 5:00 AM. It's like, 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 m- they threw them out in the middle of the night, uh, with sound bombs and rubber bullets and they 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.