Mohammed el-Kurd

El-Kurd blames the "Zionist project" – and multinational political, diplomatic, and economic support for it – for the displacement, subjugation, and statelessness of the Palestinian people, sometimes mentioning the Palestinians displaced from their homes during the Nakba that started in December 1947, a count he places at 750,000, stating that Zionist militia massacred them and forcibly removed them.

El-Kurd has stated that characterizing the Israel-Hamas war by that name does not accurately reflect what is happening on the ground because it ignores the antecedents (before October 7, 2023) of the current conflict, such a:

El-Kurd has spoken of racist remarks by Israeli officials, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, or remarks he even characterizes as "genocidal".

El-Kurd states that paying attention to such remarks is "the very answer to everything" in understanding the Gaza situation in 2023–4.

El-Kurd frequently refers to the – in his opinion, high – numbers of Palestinians killed during the conflict.

El-Kurd has maintained that the October 7 Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel, but also plane hijackings, for example, have received so much attention because Europeans, Israelis, and Americans perceive Israelis, Europeans, and Americans as "human".

By contrast, the Western media conveys to Palestinians that their deaths are simply an everyday occurrence ("quotidian"), i.e. that their deaths are "business as usual".

At the same time, Palestinians who speak out against Israeli oppression are labeled antisemitic or hateful, or at best, angry, passionate and driven by emotion.

El-Kurd has stated that for Palestinians, "every corner" of life is filled with challenges and obstacles.

He maintains that Israeli state structures are designed to oppress Palestinians, to make them want to leave, or to force them to leave.

El-Kurd notes that occupation does not only mean that Palestinians carry a different-colored ID, that their freedom of movement is restricted, and that their land is constantly at risk of theft, but also that they "live a life that is devalued every few years", as he describes it.

El-Kurd characterizes some tools of the Israeli state are techniques of colonization, such as isolating Palestinian villages by declaring the land around them to be national parks.

He maintains that Israel continues to actively colonize Palestine and that there are still many regimes around the world propagating colonialism, adapting to an increasingly progressive world by making itself less obvious than what he calls the explicit colonization that Israel carries out.

El-Kurd speaks of a Palestinian reality in East Jerusalem where oppression (evictions, demolitions) is hierarchical and normalized, muzzling and gaslighting Palestinian residents.

He personally has questioned whether he would have the energy to fight back again oppression as characteristic of Palestinians sometimes being "exhausted" from lifelong oppression.

Mohammed el-Kurd (محمد الكرد, born 15 May 1998) is a Palestinian writer and poet, who has gained prominence for his description of Palestinians' lives under occupation in East Jerusalem, the rest of the West Bank; el-Kurd has referred to evictions as a form of ethnic cleansing, and has also accused Israel of imposing apartheid-style laws and regulations onto Palestinians in the occupied territories.

He has also spoken out about the oppression in the Gaza Strip, notably the Israel–Hamas war.

El-Kurd was born in 1998 in East Jerusalem, the West Bank.

Prior to the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, he was pursuing a master's degree in the United States, but returned to protest Israel's eviction of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem (see Sheikh Jarrah controversy).

El-Kurd was born into a family of Palestinian Muslims in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on 15 May 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 Neighbourhood by Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi.

He had emigrated to the United States and settled in New York to pursue higher education, but returned to East Jerusalem during the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis.

Since his return to the Israeli-occupied West Bank amidst the Sheikh Jarrah controversy, El-Kurd has been documenting and speaking out against Palestinian displacement in East Jerusalem.

He and his twin sister, Muna el-Kurd, began campaigning to raise global awareness on Israeli policies in East Jerusalem through various social media channels.

In combination, the twins have amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter and millions of followers on Instagram.

While Muna's posts are usually in Arabic, Mohammed frequently posts in English to cater to a Western audience.

On 6 June 2021, Mohammed and Muna were both detained by Israel Police; they were later released on the same day after being detained for several hours.

During the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, Mohammed appeared on American television channels CNN, MSNBC, and CBSN.

In 2021, Mohammed and Muna were named on TIME 100 most influential people in the world.

El-Kurd graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in writing, where he created Radical Blankets, an multimedia poetry magazine that won several awards.

During his undergraduate studies he performed poetry at campuses and cultural centers across the United States.

He is currently studying for a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from Brooklyn College.

On 3 August 2023, he was announced to have been employed as the Culture Editor for Mondoweiss, a website which covers the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

El-Kurd is also a visual artist, printmaker, and fashion designer, having co-designed a collection with Serbian designer Tina Gancev.

Since 2021, el-Kurd has been the Palestine correspondent for The Nation.

His poetry and articles are in English, written on the themes of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, systemic and structural violence, settler colonialism, Islamophobia, and gender roles.

He has a published vloume of poetry, Rifqa.

El-Kurd cooperated with Palestinian musical artist Clarissa Bitar on a poetry-oud album, Bellydancing On Wounds.

El-Kurd is noted for "unapologetically" speaking out against Israeli oppression of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, both about the specific, immediate threat to, and constant stress for families like his of eviction but also all forms of oppression.