Mohammed El Kurd Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I did not understand what made our groceries contraband.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Do they not deserve life? According to whose law?

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.

I cited the tears, never the spit.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.