Mohammed El Kurd Quotes

What do you say to the children for whom the Red sea won't part?

I no longer feel the responsibility to give humans eyes for humanity.

A woman tells him a pen is a sword. What’s a pen to a rifle? Another fed him a sonnet. If Shakespeare was from here he wouldn’t be writing.

A few years ago, my grandmother and I watched men preach about patience on TV. Be patient! For after patience comes relief! My grandmother responded, After patience comes the grave!

Birth lasts longer than death. In Palestine death is sudden, instant, constant, happens in between breaths.

in Jerusalem, every footstep is a grave. /Here, every footstep is a grave, / every grandmother is a Jerusalem.

A Palestinian man cannot just die. For him to be mourned, he must be in a wheelchair or developmentally delayed, a medical professional, or noticeably elderly at the very least. Even then, there are questions about the validity of his victimhood.

It was disorienting, albeit sobering, to realize that advocating for Palestine, like all things, is entrenched in and informed by capitalism, that there was a market for our suffering, something that, for many, may have already been self-evident.

Palestine is a microcosm of the world: wretched, raging, fraught, and fragmented. On fire. Stubborn. Ineligible. Dignified. The lens we lend the Palestinian reveals how we see each other, how we see everything else.

And do their words matter when their policies speak for themselves?

The very quality of propaganda—illogic—is precisely its strongest suit, because it is a distraction. Distraction from what? The focal point: colonialism, siege, military occupation.

Our massacres are only interrupted by commercial breaks. Judges legalize them. Correspondents kill us with passive voice. If we are lucky, diplomats say that our death concerns them, but they never mention the culprit, let alone condemn the culprit. Politicians, inert, inept, or complicit, fund our demise, then feign sympathy, if any. Academics stand idle. That is, until the dust settles, then they will write books about what should have been.

In my brief twenty-two years of personhood, I have seen Palestine dwindle in size and spirit like a decaying loved one.

Language is a minefield. It has significant influence on how we think and what we believe. So remember to be CRITICAL.

Sing me a song of home break a dish or two throw a stone or two because the screams make me nostalgic: I almost don't fear the sirens.

The idea is to spit out the bait and spit at the accusation. To demystify and reject what it is they demand of us: perfect victimhood and perfect surrender.

Curating the native as “respectable” is a misplaced priority because it redirects critical scrutiny away from the colonizer, which in turn neglects the innate injustice of the colonial project.

There is a thin line between representation, particularly liberal reductions around representation, and the reproduction of the Palestinian as a fetish or a token, thus as a dehumanized subject once more.

The settler is self-deluded. The settler’s gaze ignores the ruins atop which the settler town is built. Always in the settler’s peripheral vision, rubble is both ubiquitous and unobtrusive, filtered out like our eyes do our noses.

Why do we give the authority of narration to those who have murdered and displaced us when the scarcity of their guilt means honesty is unlikely? Why do we wait for those carrying the batons to confess when our bruised bodies tell the whole truth?

We forget that belief has little to do with truth. People tend to believe the powerful, the compelling, not the sincere. The truth, that which is factual and historically accurate, is irrelevant in the face of the dominant, institutionally mainstreamed narratives that forge their truth.

I’ll hold my word to one of the men’s heads, and he’ll tremble as I press against his temple and say, Say it. Say it. Say my name without spitting.

Language is a minefield. It has significant influence on how we think and what we believe. But remember to be CRITICAL.

Citizenship has historically been a hollow formality for those condemned to the category of the dehumanized.

Our blood is the price of the colony’s sense of “security.

Our journalists are poets, almost, when narrating all this death. And the poets write with knives.‡

There is no uniform way to grieve the killing of your loved ones. Sometimes it is graceful, other times it is vengeful.

Colonial logic gaslights us to believe that it is our shortcomings, not colonialism itself, that stand between us and liberation.

Did I really have to go and “see for myself,” or did I ignore a century of Palestinian literature?

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.

You need to be polite in your suffering, should you be granted the right to a roof over your head. Crass statements are corrosive to your plight, even when such statements are about those who first steal your home and then loot your tent.

Yet the strategy of favoring non-Palestinian voices does little to bypass the reader’s anti-Palestinian bias. Instead, it reifies that bias and the power structures that manufacture it, cementing the impression that Palestinian voices are suspicious or subpar.

I am certain some readers will find those previous lines uncomfortable or even incendiary, but that is precisely the point: language comparing Zionists to Nazis is scrutinized—even penalized—more than the government policies and military actions that beg for the analogy to be made.

Take the genre of Israelis and Palestinians making films together. The Palestinian filmmaker is chaperoned to the film festival, allowed on stage as their authoritative cosignatory’s charismatic sidekick. No one—not the producer of the festival, not the columnist writing a review—seems to care about the content of the film, whether it is good or garbage. What matters most is that the film was codirected, a mode that satisfies a libidinal urge in the viewers. They eavesdrop on a forbidden conversation, a titillating reconciliation between the slayer and the slain. Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted, and our excited elevator pitches to one another all become mastur-batory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer’s fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish.

But how many hours have you wasted defending against ad hominem attacks (No, our men are gentle fathers!) or assuaging the paranoias of strawman arguments (No, “from the river to the sea” is not a secret call to genocide!) or navigating slippery slopes (No, a free Palestine will not lead to a second Holocaust!) or pausing for red herrings (No, there are no tunnels under the hospital!) or appealing to authority (Even the Israeli scholars agree that it is a genocide!) or debunking equivocations (No, anti-Zionism is not antisemitism!)? The very quality of propaganda—illogic—is precisely its strongest suit, because it is a distraction.

Did I really have to go and “see for myself,” or did I ignore a century of Palestinian literature? Am I cognizant of how that refusal to engage local and grassroots knowledge production continues to undermine its value on the world stage, undermining also the value and authority of Palestinian narration? Do I have a class analysis in my work? Do I acknowledge that I get awards for saying similar things to what the student movement has been criminalized, suspended, and censured for saying? Do I name my institutional backing? What are the material and monetary conditions of those whose voices I amplify? Am I only referencing dead guys? What does my works cited page look like?

Those asking, What happens to the settlers? have not once thought about the fate of the six million Palestinian refugees agonizing in exile. This is not so much a polemic but an observation, a fatigued observation, reiterated incessantly. Such distracting questions feed the discursive loop that prioritizes the settlers’ theoretical future over our material present that is already marked with extermination.

Resistance, in the Western mind, is a mutating concept. While Ukrainian resistance is glorified for its guerrilla warfare tactics, Palestinian resistance—termed “terrorism”—is puzzling, perverted, and pathological. Mainstream media’s insistence on these framings is not due to any fundamental differences in the ways both peoples exercise violence. Nor is it solely because of Ukrainians’ skin color; one needs to look no further than the Irish Republican Army to see that whiteness alone is no golden ticket—at least not in a war against British colonialism. Rather, the tonal shift employed in media coverage is simply in service of the West’s strategic interests. While the Israeli settler-colonial regime is the United States’ most important ally in the Middle East, and practically an offshoot of Europe, created to protect Western imperialism, Russia represents an “existential” threat to the West.35

The Palestinian People have consistently made it crystal clear that our enemy is Zionism, an ideology of dispossession, an expansionist and racist settler-colonial enterprise. Zionism, not Jews. Our capacity to produce such distinction is admirable and impressive, considering the heavy-handedness with which Zionism attempts to synonymize itself with Judaism. However, this distinction is not our responsibility, and, personally, it is not my priority.

Western knowledge producers or those using Western voices in their knowledge production should ask themselves a few questions: Where do Palestinians fit in this work? Do they have any agency, or are they a tool to drive the point across? Are my filmmaking practices extractive? How can I practice responsible authorship? Have I instilled in my project enough cues to incentivize my audience to consume it critically, or am I patting myself on the back? Am I doing the challenging chore of speaking to my bigoted, acrimonious community, accosting my Zionist aunt at the dinner table, or am I preaching—pandering, really—to the choir? Did I really have to go and “see for myself,” or did I ignore a century of Palestinian literature? Am I cognizant of how that refusal to engage local and grassroots knowledge production continues to undermine its value on the world stage, undermining also the value and authority of Palestinian narration? Do I have a class analysis in my work? Do I acknowledge that I get awards for saying similar things to what the student movement has been criminalized, suspended, and censured for saying? Do I name my institutional backing? What are the material and monetary conditions of those whose voices I amplify? Am I only referencing dead guys? What does my works cited page look like?

Palestinians wrote less than 2 percent of opinion pieces in the New York Times between 1970 and 2020. It was 1 percent in the Washington Post.4 Today it’s not uncommon to hear and see Palestinians, from Noura Erekat to Yousef Munayyer to Mohammed El-Kurd, offer a different point of view.

Not breaking cycles if that’ll break her heart. She’s had a tough life. These are her years to rest.

In 2009, Zionist settlers, adorned with backpacks as if going on a weekend camping trip, entered our homes in occupied Jerusalem, escorted by Israeli occupation forces. They claimed that our home was theirs. After a tumultuous battle with two colonial committees in Israeli occupation courts, the settlers seized half of our home. Their takeover was part of a broader effort to ethnically cleanse the entirety of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. We were among 180 Palestinian families facing dispossession orders from Israeli courts that claimed that our homes were built on Jewish lands.

American settlers find their way into the front yard, and their billionaires take us to court. Their laws are daggers. Their laws are hungry. Armed colonizers peacock around my street with impunity.

I did not understand what made our groceries contraband.

What makes some people heroes is what makes us criminals. It is almost simplistic to say that we are guilty by birth.

Our massacres are only interrupted by commercial breaks. Judges legalize them. Correspondents kill us with passive voice.

Some of us sleep in our shoes, others sleep through the waged war.

ZIONISM* IS THE LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE, through both direct, state-sanctioned violence and indirect, consequential violence, which trickles down through suffocating bureaucracies, inescapable psychological onslaughts, and impetuous intercommunal conflicts.

I cited the tears, never the spit.

Do they not deserve life? According to whose law?

WHEN TELEVISION PRODUCERS INVITE US to participate in their programs, they do not seek to interview us for our experiences or analysis or the context we can provide. They do not offer us their condolences the way they do our Israeli counterparts. They invite us to interrogate us.

These were the first words in an open letter I was asked to write to Obama in 2013. (I do not usually try to contact war criminals, but

the world needs to contend with the fact that childhood, in the context of the oppressed, is deformed beyond recognition, not because of cultural regression as the colonists love to argue, or because “we teach our children to hate,” but because of the ceaseless colonial degradation of children and their families in our world.

If Edward Said cannot get the mic, if our children cannot get the mic, who can? Who has the permission to narrate?

When Palestinians finally arrive in these works, on the screen or on the page, we are represented as victims, not as protagonists or complex characters. We are not history makers; history stomps on our bodies. Our resistance is obscured, our lineages defaced. We offer our blood and bruises as evidence, reporting our calamities without commentary, to support the author’s thesis. We become their objects—curated into context-free exhibitions, editorialized to wallow unintelligibly.

Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.” Kwame Ture, in response to a student’s question after a talk at Federal City College (now the University of the District of Columbia), in October 1968.

The very moment that the Palestinian exits the womb, he is “unchilded”—flung away from childhood by a “machinery that exists everywhere and always” and treated as both a good-for-nothing nobody and a dangerous ticking bomb at once.

Power, in this analysis, is an immutable, indelible structure set in stone, rather than an imposing yet tenuous entity resting on sand.

Humanization diverts critical scrutiny away from the colonizer and onto the colonized, obscuring the inherent injustice of colonialism, thus shielding the colonial project. In misplacing their focus, advocates (or lawyers or journalists, etc.) insinuate that the oppressed must demonstrate their worthiness of liberty and dignity, first and foremost. Otherwise occupation, subjugation, police brutality, dispossession, surveillance, and “extrajudicial executions,” would be excusable or even necessary.

Language, if we can dominate it, can turn our anonymous whispers back into thunderous declarations.

The vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh.

Invaders​came back once again, ​​​claimed the land with​​​fists and fire​excuses​beliefs of the chosen and the promised as if God is a real-estate agent.

There’s death in the eyes of this newborn. I heard the baby complain about a treacherous defeat, called it the same old catastrophe. A storm in his ear says it’s raging for silence. Thunder erupts when he’s shushed. What a worsened scenario. He skipped ahead. What do you do when your destiny is predetermined?

Why not focus on the sitting politicians describing Palestinians as “savages” that “have to be eradicated”;37 politicians whose battle cries are “finish them,”38 “level the place,”39 and “bounce the rubble in Gaza”;40 politicians who, when asked about our children, say with enthusiasm, “We should kill ’em all”?41

35 Thus, it is not so much of a surprise that newspapers owned and operated by the ruling classes delegitimize Palestinian rebellion in the same pages where they celebrate that of Ukrainians. To sustain the Zionist project in Palestine, to protect the empire’s capitalistic and militaristic endeavors in the region, the Palestinian freedom fighter must fall. And so the empire’s stenographers standardize the dehumanization of Palestinians and the demonization of their resistance.

We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It did not matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial; what mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under—

know this chapter is within itself a minefield. It will be taken out of context, disseminated and disfigured, but I will never be a perfect victim. There is no escaping being accused of antisemitism. It is a losing battle and, more importantly, a glaring red herring. And it is time we reevaluate this tactic. There are better things to do: we have coffins to carry; we have kin in Israeli mortuary chambers that we must bury.

It is not my fault that they are Jewish. I have zero interest in apologizing for centuries-old tropes created by Europeans, when millions of us confront real, tangible oppression, living behind cement walls, or under siege, or in exile, and living with woes too expansive to summarize. I am tired of the impulse to preemptively distance myself from something of which I am not guilty, and particularly tired of the constant burden to prove that I am not inherently bigoted. I’m tired of the pearl-clutching pretense that should such animosity exist, its existence would be inexplicable and rootless, of the academics and the intellectuals punching down on the unfiltered among us. Most of all, I am tired of the false equivalence between semantic “violence” and systemic violence: only one party in this “conflict” is actively engaged in the intentional and systematic attempted eradication of an entire population.

Again, a drone is one thing, but a trope is off-limits.

To call a certain reaction to injustice “human” is to imply that others are inhuman, subhuman, brutish. No one has the right to make that call. There is no uniform way to grieve the killing of your loved ones. Sometimes it is graceful, other times it is vengeful. Sometimes it is muffled, other times it is explosive. Sometimes one only dreams of revenge, and other times one pursues it. I might argue that the probable response to genocide is rage and hatred, whether rational or irrational, but grief is a lot more complicated and contradictory than this position. Abd el-Hadi continues, “my greatest apostasy / is this:” no sooner does the laughter    of a child reach me,    or I happen upon  a sobbing stream, no sooner do I see a flower wilting, or notice a fine-looking woman, than I am stunned and abandoned by everything, and nothing of me remains, except Abd el-Hadi the fool!*

How have we allowed the world to demand of us hospitality even in hunger? What is it that makes an untimely and out-of-place disavowal of bigotry seem like a crucial part of an obituary? Is disproving libel the sole reason we roam this earth? We talk about the racism that follows the Palestinian’s name, particularly its manifestations in policy and procedure, but we should also consider its psychic cost. Do we understand the impact such aspersions have on the Palestinian’s psyche? How does spending a life in cross-examination influence our gaze? How does it guide our interactions and relationships? Have we, in our efforts to disown the legacy of the terrorist, reared settlers in our subconscious?

What happens to him after all of this death, once he is alone and away from the cameras? What kind of man will the boy carrying his brother’s limbs in a bag grow up to be? Does it matter whether he emerges as Abd el-Hadi or as Abu Obaida? Does it make Zionism any less indefensible?

So I ask again: What if our perfect victims do in fact despise those who have killed their families? Then what? Let me ask the most exaggerated, extreme version of this question: What if, after a Star-of-David-clad soldier of the self-proclaimed “Jewish state” killed your loved ones in cold blood, you began to obsessively, irrationally hate Jews, all Jews, wherever they may be? Then what? Does your venomous sentiment undermine your status as a victim? Does it rewrite history to absolve the soldier of his sins? Does it justify the crime?

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” Meir, A Land of Our Own, 242.

It is to be shouted over, silenced, by people who claim to fear for their lives from the safety of apartments that have never been blistered by white phosphorus, that have endured nothing fiercer than a US winter, while people in another corner of the planet dig for loved ones buried in the wreck of flattened buildings. Conversations about Palestine in the West are steered by abstractions, about the meaning of Zionism, about the threat level of words, about a logistically impossible yet impossibly imminent genocide of the Jewish people.*

In situating the Holocaust outside of history, in placing it not just in the past but in an eternal future, Zionism today has created a status quo in which the possibility of a second holocaust is given primacy over a holocaust happening in the present.

Because the absurdity is the point of his diatribe—it provides his allies with a childish anthem for taunting us, and it tempts us into believing that the absurd can be fought with logical reasoning.

But in truth, and to state the obvious, nothing renders me killable. Before I threw the rock, they stole my land. Before I picked up the rifle, they shot my loved ones. Before I made the makeshift rocket, they put me in a cage. What I read cannot be used as a pretext to kill me, even if I filled my library with books written by psychopaths, interchangeably stacking copies of Mein Kampf and Hillary Clinton’s Hard Choices.

The idea is to “debunk” with dignity, always while naming the elephant in the room: propaganda. My mission is not to clear my name from false accusations; rather it is to unmask the deceit and duplicity of my accusers.

Like all those who reiterated the line “Shireen Abu Akleh is American,” the reporter who sent the email had to have believed it could lead to some form of accountability. The US is idle when its biggest ally slaughters the stateless, but when a citizen is the victim of that kind of violence, there must be consequences. Violence—suddenly, surprisingly—becomes deplorable. Killing journalists becomes more scandalous and easier to denounce when they are Americans or Europeans. Citizenship, in this worldview, flings Shireen away from the crime of being Palestinian and closer to blamelessness, increasing her chances of recourse. It is “strategic,” some might argue. But then Rachel Corrie comes to mind.*

We enter these rooms and pander—and are pandered to—to secure a seat at the table. It is for good reason that we shed our skin to assimilate into the world that invisibilizes us: after acquiring respectability and protection, we will finally wear our real faces. But we quickly learn that the inside is already rotten, and we too run the risk of decay. Once we have institutional protection, we’ll want to stay protected. And once we get some money, we’ll want more wealth. When we go back to ourselves after a long career and look deep in our closets for the skin we once wore, we find it shriveled and discolored, foreign to us as we are foreign to it. One could say it is strategic—but we know what the master’s tools will not do.

So deride liars who throw rocks and hide their hands; deride manipulators who exploit taboos and tragedies to maintain a monopoly on violence, who craft their words to extract an urgent, penitent reverence out of you. Derision, in this context, teaches those who share your frustrations that they should not be shamed into accepting an upside-down world. Instead, it acts as a catalyst for critical thinking and intellectual autonomy, empowering the audience to question the status quo, to satirize it, to strip it naked before its yes-men and sycophants.

For the Arab in the West, the task is to carefully detonate presumptions or suffer their explosions. We must measurably show, before all else, our distance from the charges lodged at us. We need to prove, in the face of preposterous hostility, that we are respectable civilians, journalists, medics, and professors who “are not like Hamas.” One blunder is enough to give credence to the rumors that haunt us. The numbers of casualties we report? Inflated. Our tragedies? Orchestrated in “Pallywood.”18 Our mutilated children, incinerated by Israeli warplanes? Dolls used as war propaganda.

And in that performance of irreverence, you enmesh yourself in their complexities, you make room for them in the public discourse, no matter how they articulate themselves, and you reassign the blame from the victim to the perpetrator. Otherwise, we would be punching down—we would save ourselves and ascend in our careers by throwing others under the bus. For one to be described as genteel, someone else needs to be viewed as savage.

In this realm, laughter is akin to faith in its ability to make wounds hurt a little less.

would like Gaza to sink into the sea.” I could flood the next few pages with similar quotes. One instinct might be to argue that every accusation is a confession. Another is to neatly show that the colonizer and colonized are governed by two sets of rules—what would the diplomatic response be if, say, Mahmoud Abbas said those words?† What would happen to a Palestinian’s career and reputation should they sing the same tune? What free speech? The duplicity is glaring. But pointing out double standards, albeit an effective tool of radicalization, is not a sustainable, long-term political program. And do their words matter when their policies speak for themselves?

To say explicitly: We cite the settlers’ epiphanies not because they are miraculous but because the audience rejects hearing, let alone meaningfully engaging, Palestinians. We quote the talk show host celebrating the massive number of martyrs in Gaza because the American citizen and the American president alike slander the Palestinian Ministry of Health’s credibility. To disclose: We are instrumentalizing footage that has been obtained through access journalism. We are betting on our racial privilege. We reference the Israeli genocide scholar because they are Israeli first. The political duty I refer to involves deregulating the racist structures that elevate one testimony over another on a purely identitarian basis—to name them, challenge them, and refuse to perpetuate them.

SO HERE WE ARE IN THE FINAL HOUR, if there was ever one. The task is difficult, or difficult to define. And I’m not preaching from a pulpit, but speaking while suffocating under the weight of my own helplessness, trying to understand what I should do, trying to understand what it is that I am doing. I am often asked, in interviews and on university campuses, what role I think literature plays in the Palestinian liberation movement. And though the question itself is not subversive, it certainly feels that way: What is the role of literature? Who does it serve, here, in the English-speaking world, in fancy hotel lobbies and fancy college auditoriums, planets away from the makeshift rifles of the refugee camps? It is hard to say. It is hard to imagine what a poem can do in the barrel of a gun.

a settler in Palestine will make a film about other, worse settlers, who laugh as they testify about Tantura, where they buried our ancestors in mass graves, a massacre we have narrated for decades, with visceral recollection, in our movies, in our novels and songs, in our oral histories.

They roam the streets mumbling in aggressive Arabic, sometimes even reading the Quran, salivating to loot and shoot everything in sight. Beware—they’re coming after you. Hide your wives, hide your planes, hide your human shields. Many who are reading these sentences have a mental image of whom I am describing and, it wouldn’t be farfetched to say, associate serious feelings and memories with such mental images.

In the case of the latter, those who pledge allegiance to this status quo likely do so because they earnestly believe in the binaries it upholds (good vs. evil, civilized vs. uncivilized, terrorist vs. soldier, etc.) but feel there are certain exceptions to those dichromatic categories. For example, some might respect the violence of men and women in military fatigues as a prosaic, indispensable fact of life, while simultaneously clutching their pearls at violent acts orchestrated by “lone wolves” in flip-flops and tracksuits.*

Protest movements are generally revered in the past tense, once their radical demands become a boring norm. In real time, though, they are led by killjoys and looters who don't understand there's a time and a place.

The sniper lurks not only atop our homes but in conference rooms and newsrooms, on university campuses and in hospital corridors.

- [ ] Zionism is best defined by its material manifestations — Zionism is what Zionism does. When Zionism’s most recent manifestation is genocide, what difference does it make whether the encampments protesting this genocide are utopias of coexistence? What difference does it make how the grieving grieve? Curating the native as “respectable” is a misplaced priority because it redirects critical scrutiny away from the colonizer, which in turn neglects the innate injustice of the colonial project. This misplaced focus insinuates that the oppressed must earn what they are already entitled to: liberty, dignity, and basic rights. Otherwise, if the native is not “respectable,” slavery and subjugation would be necessarily applicable, rather than morally reprehensible. Nothing reveals more about the colonizer’s psyche than these arrogant expectations.

What becomes of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, who calendars are marked by routine bombardments? What are the mental and muscular consequences of being forced to transform a taxi into a hearse? What becomes of the nurse whose shift is interrupted by the arrival of her husband’s corpse on a stretcher? What about the father wandering with what remains of his son in two plastic bags? What happens to him after all of this death, once he is alone and away from the cameras? What kind of man will the boy carrying his brother’s limbs in a bag grow up to be? Does it matter whether he emerges as Abd el-Hadi or as Abu Obaida? Does it make Zionism any less indefensible?

Our flaws haven’t led us to the position of indoctrinating and systematizing the worst parts of ourselves to subjugate other people.