Mohammed El-Kurd Is Just Being Honest

Yeah, in August. I was in Atlanta for art school. They recruited me. It's really silly to say out loud, but when I was 14, I had written an open letter to Obama and the university recruiter read it in The Guardian, and he came all the way to Jerusalem and offered me a full ride. I had been accepted to a few universities in the States, but none of them offered me money. So I decided to go to Atlanta. To go from Jerusalem to Atlanta was kind of crazy.

Yeah. Atlanta is a Black city ultimately, so it felt very different from the rest of the U.S., especially with how they see Black people in the South. I don't think I've ever spoken about this, so I’m trying to formulate my thoughts, but I think coming to that city as such an introverted person and being met with so much dignity from Black Southerners… It taught me a lot. And then a few years after that, there were the George Floyd uprisings and Abolish the Police, and it just made me think, “Oh, we can do that, too.”

Yeah. I studied writing, but I studied writing in an art university that was commercially driven. It was more “how do you get your writing to the big screen?” or whatever. And so in a lot of ways, it liberated me from the shackles of journalism school, because when you're a journalist you are really limited. I think there are certain dated rules of journalism that you must follow, like the myth of objectivity and whatnot. Not being beaten over the head with that really allowed me to speak freely, for one. And two, because I went to such a weird commercial school, I was able to become a great propagandist, because propaganda is ultimately marketing.

Poetry is a huge part of Arabic culture. Less so today, but historically for you to be a poet, you were like a professional sycophant. You would basically be paid to write poetry about the king. My mother also used to be a writer, and in school you read a lot of poetry. With poetry and fiction, it was like an alternative history for marginalized people. You write your own history. It's less censored in poetry and in fiction, especially compared to journalism, and that's what really made me want to enter it.

I've always seen a political utility in my work even though I love poetry. I love the craft so much and I love writing. I love prose. I love reading. But I've always been like: “What is the utilitarian function of this?”

There's this super politically involved poet named Rashid Hussein from the ‘60s and ‘70s. His writing style was super sarcastic, dry and ironic. In the ‘60s, there was an Israeli land law passed that designated something like 93 percent of Palestinian land to be owned by the Israeli state. So he wrote a poem called God as a Refugee that basically just made fun of the law. It was very mind opening for me because it was just like, oh! Poetry doesn't have to be this polished, polite thing. You can be a bitch.

No one ever asked me about this and I’ve always wanted to talk about it. [laughs] I mean, this is like basic shit, but the way you present yourself is how people perceive you and make assumptions about you. It’s also a racialized subject: I'm Palestinian, I'm Arab, I'm seen as violent or whatever. So as a 14-year-old at the European Parliament I wanted to wear a button-up and fake glasses. I was a child but I wanted to be taken seriously.

Later in life, the more I read and the more I started thinking critically about the world, I thought it would be much, much better to subvert this idea of having to present as a civilized or worldly Arab. So then in 2021, when I got the opportunity to speak at the United Nations underneath that green marble, I decided to wear a leather jacket and a random T-shirt underneath it.

Obviously my mom was upset. It was very controversial. Some people were impressed by it and many people were just like clowning me on Twitter, understandably, because the idea is to look nice and wear a suit or whatever. But the clothes said what I wanted to say: That this is not a nice place, this is not a nice occasion, and I don't give a shit. You’re all a bunch of slacking, complicit, highly paid war profiteers.

One hundred percent. So that’s always been a part of my practice. If you watch interviews that I do or if you read my work, I am much more interested in rhetoric and linguistics than I am in statistics and facts. There’s already an abundance of statistics and facts, and a scarcity of meta investigations in how these power relations work in the mainstream. When I'm on CNN for example, I do the pre-interview where they vet you and they make sure you don't say anything crazy. I give them the answers they want to hear.

Then when you’re on live television you understand that the conversation is no longer between you and the TV presenter. It's between you and the viewer. You want to show them that the TV presenter is biased or the question they’re asking is flawed or racist or problematic, and so you do that by tone and facial expressions. You say to the presenter, "Let me stop you, let me interrupt you” or whatever—and those things tend to really travel. It’s much more compelling television than repeating stats or UN resolutions.

My friends would maybe say that I'm a shallow person, but I care about the way I present myself. I don't want to be too polished or I don't want to be too preppy or whatever because that's kind of the image that the worldly Palestinian has been subjected to. I hate having to appear polished in order to be taken seriously. My loyalty is with the people back home who sometimes don't have the means to dress that way or, like, don't have the fucking patience for it. I'm of a working class background and I just can't take myself seriously in a suit. I really cannot.

Yeah. My favorite designer is GmbH. I'm biased because I'm friends with them, but I think they make wonderful clothes. They actually gave me the leather jacket for the UN. They're also super politically conscious in a way that's not tacky. You could be a designer who's politically conscious and you plaster memorabilia all over your shirt and it's a bit on the nose. They do it in a better way.

Every single day someone says hello to me. It's always so positive and it's super overwhelming and it's very nice.

Actually, I'll tell you the craziest thing. I wanted to write about this, but I never had the time, and this is a real story. So, October 7th happened, right? I'm in Derry, Ireland, of all places. It’s stressful. My visa expired in the U.S. and I have to renew it. My appointment is coming up and I'm talking to my lawyer. I'm really scared that they're going to reject me at the interview because tensions are super high. My lawyer's having me memorize this monologue. I have his number written on my wrist.

So I’m in Belfast and I go to the U.S. embassy or consulate. My heart's pounding. But the guy working there recognizes me, and he asks me where I work, I tell him what I do, and he goes, "I loved your essay about sneaking into a settlement."

I thought at first he was being sarcastic, but then he started listing other things I have written about. And he was like, "I'm a huge fan of your writing.” And they approved my passport.

Then a week later, I'm leaving from Dublin to go back to New York. When you travel to Dublin, you land domestically, so I'm going through U.S. customs there. I get to the window, and the guy smiles at me. He just looks at his wrist and he has a “Free Gaza” bracelet on, and I go through.

Since then I have been so fucking arrogant. I'm like, everything's going to work out in my favor. [laughs]

So I kept saying no. I was just like, “I'm not going to fly to Texas or whatever to talk to you,” so I asked him to come to New York—and he came to New York. I think it helps that I don't take myself that seriously. Before a big event like that, I prepare and I prepare well. I talk to lots of people from different sectors in Palestine and elsewhere.

The actual preparation for the interview was just like a day or two. I talked to a few people and I was just like, I want to make a point about, for example, how Israeli and American police departments train together, and how that impacts police brutality against Black people. So I just talked to all my friends, casually talking to people on WhatsApp. Receiving voice messages and like preparing my talking points.

The kind of fame I have is not individual. I'm not an actor, I'm not just a poet. I became visible and known through activism. It’s a collective thing and my voice is no longer mine. The idea that I was countering Netanyahu is unfair. I don't have the training that he has, or the institutional backing, or the speech writers, or a team. I went to that interview on the bus.

Malcolm X spoke about how when there’s a lack of leadership, artists and actors and that those people become the representatives of the people. And I think in Palestine it's the same thing. Our leadership class is so heavily sedated or complicit with the Israelis that it falls on the artists and singers and fashion designers and actors and writers to represent us. It’s an unfair demand to ask all these singers and actors to be politically conscious. But I think also as unfair as it is, like, tough shit, this is how it is.

There's still a level of privilege that comes with visibility and that can really fuck with you.

Like, I'm on the cover of GQ Middle East to talk about Palestine, but I'm also really excited about the clothes! Anybody who says otherwise, who’s opposed to glamour, is a liar in my opinion. It’s a fine balance because sometimes I'm just like, why can't I just be regular famous?

The Palestinian man in the Western imagination is largely seen as a terrorist. We use the rhetoric of Palestinian women and children to separate, to create categories in which men are fighters, women and children are not, and men are condemned to die, and women and children are mournable. But when we do that, we're revoking all of the agency from the women and children—all of the contributions and all of the long historical legacy in which women, and in some cases children, have contributed to the Palestinian revolutionary struggle. The first Intifada was led by women.

The choice to use the masculine pronouns was obviously a very political, very intentional choice. I wanted the reader to confront the Palestinian man. I didn't want the reader to be like, "Oh, Palestinian men deserve to live." I wanted the reader to confront not only the father, but the fighter. I wanted them to actually confront the Palestinian man who chooses to take up arms and deal with it. Palestinian men should be mournable.

Obviously it wasn't the easiest decision to make. I didn't want to contribute to like erasure or like gender-based inequality or whatever, and like it felt for the time being and at the height of the Gaza genocide discourse where Palestinian men are constantly defamed or erased, it felt like the right move to make. And I knew when I wrote my book that it wasn't going to be covered, you know?

I knew it wasn't going to be picked up by any of the mainstream publications—and it was true. No legacy publication covered it or anything, even though it was like a New York Times bestseller. No one talked about it. Unlike many others, I feel like I have a leg up on people who feel like they have to soften or water down their rhetoric. I already have such a massive platform. It was such a betrayal to myself and my self-image to not say things bluntly.

Thank you, I think that's really nice to hear, but also everything in the book is like what people say. That was such a big point of contention for me because the whole time I was writing it, I was like, "Everybody knows this. Everybody thinks this." That was why I made such a big point to write beautiful prose and make it sound musically inclined, because I was just like, "Okay, if this is a point, if this is a thesis everybody has, at least it'll be beautifully articulated."

I mean, first of all, no one has ever asked me this question or noticed the goofiness in the book or like the silly writing.

Well, two points. One is that I read a lot, and I read about their tactics in 2009. A now defunct Israeli ministry called the Ministry of Strategic Affairs in collaboration with the Israel Project published an 80-page manual where there's a scenario for everything and instructions for how you deal with every scenario. If someone says this, you say this. If you're a diplomat on CNN, you say this, but if you're a student in this university, you say, "I feel unsafe." If you're a politician on ABC News, you say, "We mourn every civilian death, but…"

So you understand that these people are very, very measured and calculated. They are using psychological tricks. They're using marketing techniques and you learn to see through them. Similar to wearing the leather jacket in the advocacy world, and especially when it comes to Israel and Palestine, Israelis can just be experts. They can just be spokespeople. They can go to school for communication and become spokespeople, whereas for me to secure a spot on CNN, which is how I became known, I had to have survived or been a victim to a crazy calamity, a crazy crime. Our house was taken by Israelis. Other people's whole families were annihilated. And only then would they earn the space to speak.

When you’re Palestinian, your work is not taken seriously unless you're like a really serious academic, so I wanted to make as many jokes as possible, within reason. I thought it was necessary because there's such a binary between the activist and the academic and I want to collapse that a little bit, because in a movement, the students and student activists are the ones who pay the heftiest prices. Scholars and the academics are usually way more cautious. I wanted to be loyal to the students because I'm closer to them.

One, she was a beacon of self-respect and dignity, almost to a fault. I think self-respect was her disease. She would not allow anyone to see her in sickness whatsoever. I think the last thing she did before she died was rip out the IV from her arm, walk a few paces, and then she collapsed. From her, I learned to never shrink myself or humiliate myself in service of anyone. I'd rather die than make a disclaimer. Who are you to question me? I don't owe you an explanation. You're not the boss of me. And that has taught me a lot. Two, she was kind of a jukebox for proverbs—

I should use that.

Obviously, proverbs can be reactionary and right-wing and dumb as hell, but she happened to sometimes use good ones. My favorite one she'd ever said was like: They asked the Pharaoh, “Who made you a Pharaoh?” And the Pharaoh said, "No one stopped me." Shit like that. It's so silly and rhythmic, but it came from a place of truth. She wasn’t perfect. She was Palestinian and a believer of justice, but she was also conservative in lots of regards. She was classist, even though we were super poor. Before the Nakba, she was rich. She was stripped and dispossessed of all of her wealth, but she retained the classism. She was part of the literati. She lived in a refugee project, but she still felt a sense of arrogance, like, “Why am I here?” I think those things are important. For good storytelling, you can't write about angels. It's boring as hell.

The rehearsed answer that I will give is that I believe optimism is a political obligation, but it's been really hard to find optimism these days. I find it in my friends mostly. I think the most important thing in my life right now is the ability to laugh because that's kind of the only thing we have left. They're taking our villages and they're taking our arms and they're taking everything. So I don't know. I think laughing with my friends, as silly as that sounds, has given me optimism. You die if you're not optimistic.