Mohammed el-Kurd is a 25 year old Palestinian writer and poet, who came to prominence for his description of Palestinians’ lives under occupation in East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank. He has referred to evictions as a form of ethnic cleansing and has also accused Israel of imposing apartheid-style laws and regulations onto his people in the occupied territories. Lately he has also spoken out about the oppression in the Gaza Strip in the Israel–Hamas War.
El-Kurd and his noted activist twin sister Muna el-Kurd was born in in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on May 15, 1998. In 2009, part of his family’s home in Sheikh Jarrah was seized by Israeli settlers. He was the main subject of the 2013 documentary film My Neighborhood by Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi. He had emigrated to the United States and settled in New York to study for a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from Brooklyn College but returned to East Jerusalem during the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis.
The twins have hundreds of thousands of followers on X [Twitter] and millions on Instagram. While Muna’s posts are usually in Arabic, Mohammed frequently posts in English for a Western audience. On June 6 2021, they were both detained by Israeli Police but were later released on the same day. During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, Mohammed appeared on American television including CNN, MSNBC, and CBSN. In 2021, Mohammed and Muna were named on the TIME 100 most influential people in the world.
In 2021 Mohammed published Rifqa, a poetry collection reflecting the struggles of his people.
His appearances on American university campuses and at other events have been challenged with charges of anti-Semitism and Tory MPs called for his expulsion from Britain.
El-Kurd challenges Western media that regularly ask Palestinian guests to denounce violent protests or attacks by Hamas and other groups, characterizing these questions as inciting, bigoted and disrespectful. To one such question from a CNN anchor, he responded “Do you support the violent dispossession of me and my family?”. He said that the incident was an example that Palestinians will no longer accept “racism and misrepresentation” on Western television, and that like him, they “really don’t take shit” any longer.
War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens
after Audre Lorde.
There are many roots.
War machines are coin-operated arcade games,
and your penny sprays and juvenile plays
are just as greedy as a bulldozer’s mouth
chewing life into debris for me to dish-wash and make poetry of.
War machines wear lipstick, carry bedazzled purses, and wave hellohowareyou?
vogue on said debris/pink faucets. If you ignore the rubble,
this is a haven––its earth is flesh, brown and uncounted.
War machines are American-made, and they are never thirsty rivers in their throats.
American water is brown and dirtied and children famished,
cracked, caged in cages, in uneducated education.
Surf their boats in drought. Their knuckles stiff, cold is this verse.
I sit here wondering:
Which me will survive bulldozers undoing God?
Which me will soak their hands in these wells?
Which me will console the dead’s loved ones with prevention, not mourning,
bottle our Jordan River to smack American thirst,
for greed and grief.
Water stolen or neglected.
Which me will survive all these liberations?
—Mohammed el-Kurd
Mohammed El-Kurd, War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens after Audre Lorde from Rifqa © 2021 by Mohammed El-Kurd from Haymarket Books.
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