EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Mohammed El-Kurd Discusses Western Media Reporting on Palestine
“When I mean implement Palestinians, I don't mean hiring an intern to grab your coffee, but correspondents.” Mohammed El-Kurd
On November 15th 2021, Palestinian poet and journalist, Mohammed El-Kurd, was interviewed at Palestine Deep Dive’s New York event in collaboration with the Foreign Press Association, “Distant Voices No More? Giving Rise to a New Generation of Palestinian Journalists”. The interview transcript is featured below.
This interview centres on Mohammed’s perception of Western media coverage on Palestine through his unique insight having experienced it from ‘both ends’. Firstly, since childhood having given interviews for various news articles and documentaries reporting on the attempted forced ethnic displacement of his family from their home in Sheikh Jarrah and now as a journalist himself working for The Nation as its first Palestine correspondent. Mohammed has repeatedly called for other leading publications to do the same and hire Palestinian correspondents.
The event marks the launch of Palestine Deep Dive’s campaign, #ShowBothSides, heeding to Mohammed ‘s call by encouraging major publications to hire more Palestinian correspondents on the ground in Palestine, in an attempt to restructure the mainstream media to finally respect the centrality of Palestinian voices.
Hosted by Senior Correspondent for Al Jazeera English, Mike Hanna, the evening featured contributions from Prof Rashid Khalid, former President of the UN General Assembly, María Fernanda Espinosa, Dr Ramzy Baroud, Mark Seddon, Zarefah Baroud, Enas Ghannam (Project Manager of We Are Not Numbers), Pam Bailey, Ian Williams and rock icon, Roger Waters. Read more about the event and watch all the contributions.
TRANSCRIPT: Mohammed El-Kurd Interview Focusing on the Western Media
Interviewer: So my first question to you is actually a very simple one. This has been a crazy year for you and your family. Can you just tell us, first of all, how are you doing? How's your family doing and what is the latest on your family home and Sheikh Jarrah?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah, absolutely. I've been good and my family has been good. You know, it's really good for them to have a community to go through this together with, and they're not alone in this. In terms of the most recent updates, we are still awaiting a dispossession order.
We're still waiting for the court to make a ruling because they've offered us an “agreement” between us and the settlers that would allow us to stay in our homes for a few years before we would ultimately be again rendered homeless. So, we said no to this agreement because we still believe unanimously in the righteousness of our cause and we believe that we own our homes.
So we said no to the agreement with the settlers, and now we're waiting for what happens.
But I want to take this opportunity to say that the situation is not just a situation, the danger and the risk of dispossession, the danger of homelessness, of being replaced by settlers is not just one that affects my community, but rather the larger community of Jerusalem. In the nearby neighborhood, like Silwan, you have 80 plus families about to lose their homes, to demolition orders, to be replaced with a “biblical” park. You have, in a nearby neighborhood Issawiya, you have families also facing the similar prospect. So this ongoing ethnic dispossession of Palestinians from Jerusalem is still happening in continuous, and it's still a huge risk.
Interviewer: Your story and the story of your family and all the other communities that you're talking about, they are not new although they may be new to a Western audience just within the last year because of the events that transpired. But they were not new and you and I actually spoke in November and I had been following your story even years before that.
Can you talk to us about your efforts to try and get the spotlight on what was happening in east Jerusalem? I mean I remember seeing you as a young child, you and Muna [Muna El-Kurd] talking about that in a Just Vision documentary. But talk to us, over the years how hard was it for you to try and get, what has now happened, which is an international spotlight on the communities of East Jerusalem.
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah, I think I just found a really good angle, you know, because it's been going on since 1972 and we in Palestine have been so desensitized to our own oppression.Yani, I remember getting the calls from my family in October a month before you interviewed me about getting an eviction notice from the court. And I was like, “oh my God, here we go again, I have to do interviews!” Because it's been a theme of my life, my whole entire life.
And I have to convince myself to do it because in my mind, I think like, “oh, we're going to lose our home. It's not as bad as, you know, getting your home demolished or having your entire family bombed.” And there's this hierarchy of oppression that forces you to kind of be silenced. But this time around I decided not to be silenced. We decided that there's a crisis and there's an urgency to this. And we just have to articulate it in a way that rings true to the urgency of the situation on the ground.
And I sent that first email, we reached out to all of the media people we know, to all the organizations we know and we created a grassroots campaign. And you know, we're not the first people to do anything like this. And this has been the effort of thousands and thousands of people, not just my family, but it made me very proud to know that we defeated a state with a Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
Interviewer: Yeah, I mean when you sent out that first wave of trying to get the international spotlight and attention, what was the reception like? Because I think for a lot of us, and when I first heard about your story more recently in November I immediately knew that this was going to be a contentious discussion. And I didn't expect that, I didn't anticipate, that it would lead to the kind of violence that we saw in May, but certainly I anticipated that this was going to create a mobilization effort in East Jerusalem, just from my experience of seeing what always is the threshold, but from your vantage point, talk to us about that first wave of communication, you guys tried to do in organizing. What was the reception like? Were people like, “no, we're not interested, we don't understand that, we don't want to cover it, we don't want to touch it”?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah. I mean, definitely. There was this reluctance to talking about this, first of all, because it happens all the time, like “who cares that a Palestinian family is going to be displaced?” That's the first thing. But then because of the language, you know, I use the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ to describe what's going on. And there were fights behind the scenes on the phone. We were fighting, I was fighting with journalists trying to get them to use my words because they just completely wanted to call it an eviction.
And, you know, we were able to establish the case that when you have an entire army of militarized police, hundreds and hundreds of them, when you have settlers that are wielding their own rifles, when you have a judicial system that is working together with several organizations that are billionaire backed and working outside of the United States, attacking this community of refugees, this is not necessarily an eviction. It does not look like an eviction. And that was a very clearly believable and convincing case because it's what you saw on the ground! And we were able to make that breakthrough. And to the receiving audience - to the world - the difference between ethnic displacement, force dispossession and eviction is a huge difference. And it's what really sparked this mobilization. This is not to take away from the heft and the risks that come with eviction and how impoverished communities, particularly in the United States, are forcibly evicted by gentrification and whatnot. But again, what's happening on the ground in Jerusalem against Palestinians is forcible transfer of a population from one place to another, which is illegal under international law and it is a war crime.
Interviewer: The senior advisor to the Israeli prime minister at the time Mark, Regev called it a real estate dispute.
[Laughter]
Mohammed El-Kurd: Does it look like a real estate dispute to you?
[Laughter]
Interviewer: I'm the one asking the questions tonight! I know you're a journalist, but this is a one-way conversation!
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah it is a real estate dispute, you know, God is the real estate agent and he gave them the land and we were just you know…
[Laughter]
Interviewer: Okay, fair enough.
[More laughter]
Interviewer: I do want to ask you about the impact that you and your sister and the others who began to broadcast using social media had, and we'll get into the specifics of what many Palestinian activists believe to be censorship, or at least the manipulation of the algorithm within social media to try and, if at the very least, not silence but to marginalize Palestinian voices that were reporting on the ground.
Talk to us about the moment you decided that you actually have a tool in your own hand that was allowed to bypass the traditional media institutions of the world and speak directly to a global audience, and what was that reception like when you began doing that? Do you remember the first time that you did it?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah, I mean we understood yani - this is not necessarily things I say out loud in the media because they think it's not that important - but when we were first starting to design the campaign, we thought like we needed the most basic slogan, the memorable slogan, repeatable slogan. And this is where “Save Sheikh Jarrah” came from. And that was the first step.
But also because I lived in the United States for four years and understanding the new cycle, the new cycle is informed by social media. In the past 10 years social media has dominated what pundits say on TV, what journalists say on TV. And we recognized that by penetrating social media, we were able to penetrate the news cycle and force Palestine at the center of the news cycle. And we just communicated this to the people that were following our cause. And we said like, “we are the news cycle”.
And of course people say “it's because of social media”, but I would say it was in spite of social media. There's a lot of censorship going on, documented just a few weeks ago. There was a whistleblower report from Facebook that revealed that my account being demoted was being discussed among Facebook employees. And this search certainly rings true for more and more Palestinians, not just me. So being able to go around the algorithms, going around censorship was a complete success for Palestinians and their allies everywhere.
Interviewer: It sounds to me, and this is kind of new to me, but it sounds like there was a concerted effort that you worked within the community and organizers. It wasn't just, you started broadcasting and next thing you know, it became viral, right?
Mohammed El-Kurd: No, no, no, no.
Interviewer: Talk to us a little bit about that. Like, who else was in that organizing committee, how did you guys come up with this idea? Shed light on it, if you can.
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah. I mean, this is going to get me in trouble, but since 1972, we had a community for Sheikh Jarrah Committee, of Sheikh Jarrah, defending Sheikh Jarrah. And it was composed mainly of our parents and our grandparents. And they've been struggling so hard for decades and decades on end, but they did not necessarily understand social media and they did not understand what goes, quote unquote “viral” and what reaches an audience.
And there was this kind of conflict between me and my father, for example. And there was this conflict between us, the younger generation in the neighborhood and the older generation, because they wanted to play it by the book. They want it to call it an eviction because they don't want to upset the courts. They said, if we call it an eviction, we can just plead it for anti-discrimination laws. It wouldn't upset the courts and then we would keep our homes. But we've maintained that for the decades we've been fighting for our homes, we've already lost five homes in Sheikh Jarrah and we've maintained that that status quo is not successful.
By calling it settler colonialism, not only do you accurately and objectively reflect what's going on in the ground of having a native population replaced by settlers, but this umbrella term rings true for other Palestinians and other communities who are facing displacement through other names like home demolitions or green saving and so on and so forth.
And I didn't do it by myself yani, none of us did. We had to establish a speech, a rhetoric. We had to establish connections with different media organizations that were working on the ground. And all of our campaign was entirely grassroots informed. And you know, today I have a large platform and I recognize that whenever I want to make a statement, I can just make a statement because unfortunately it's unfair to me, but it's unfortunately true that there's not many Palestinians in the public eye. So, what I say is kind of representative of Palestinians, so now whenever I want to make a large statement, I make sure to consult with various organizations and various movements to get their viewpoint on things. And that way you kind of establish a good diplomatic rhetoric. And when I say diplomatic, I don't mean wishy-washy, I mean it’s good.
Interviewer: Is it a burden or is it a privilege that you have this platform with hundreds of thousands of followers and you speak on behalf of a community that has been marginalized in silence, what do you think?
Mohammed El-Kurd: It's terrible! No, I'm kidding.
[Laughter]
Interviewer: No, no. I mean, honestly you were very vocal and I think part of your authenticity is what also brought a lot of attention to the issue. But as you mentioned, you now have a responsibility, whether you like it or not, you have become - you and your sister - have become to a certain extent the voice of that community, maybe in large part because you have lived in America, you speak English, those are realities of the media climate that we work in. Is it a burden or is it a privilege?
Mohammed El-Kurd: It's an obligation. That's the word I like to choose because I don't hate doing it. I love doing it actually, but there is a burden that comes with it. There's a lot of heft to having this kind of platform.
I will say this, you know sometimes people in غزة [Gaza] there are often mad at me because they don't speak as much about غزة [Gaza], which is so true! We only tend to mention غزة [Gaza] - Gaza [English pronunciation], as you guys say it -
[Laughter]
We only tend to mention it when it's getting bombarded. But as much as I want to talk about it, I don't have the authority to narrate about غزة [Gaza], I don't have the arrogance of an American journalists who get thinks they can go to غزة [Gaza] and be like, “here with you live Chad from the Gaza strip.” I don't have that!
[Laughter]
And I wish yani, as much as I learned and I write about it, but I think the next phase in this is to empower other Palestinians because we exist across the stretches of desperate geographies of desperate legal statuses, we are facing this dispossession differently. If you're not getting demolished, you're getting bombed. If you're not getting bombed, you're getting evicted. If you're not getting evicted, your residency is getting revoked and you need people who are able to narrate that with authority. And yes, it's wonderful that I'm in the, in the, in the public eye, I'm in the spotlight, but it would be even more powerful if organizations, media organizations, were able to make structural changes to implement Palestinians who have the authority to speak about certain things. And when I mean implement Palestinians, I don't mean hiring an intern to grab your coffee, but correspondents.
Interviewer: In my defense, I started off as an intern!
[Laughter]
And I did grab a lot of coffee and in my time there were a lot of fax machines. We didn't have emails, so I had to rip the fax machine and go give it to the reporters who would then read. But all that to say is I think it's about the journey of where you started and you should not be discouraged. If they're already young journalists here and you are an intern, stay in it. It pays off in the end!
But before we get to the critique of American media, and, believe me, there is a lot to critique about American media, I just want to wrap up on you a little bit, which is that you've recently been appointed as a Palestine correspondent for The Nation. Congratulations to you.
Mohammed El-Kurd: Thank you.
Interviewer: You're also a poet.
Mohammed El-Kurd: I think so.
[Laughter]
Interviewer: We have the books to suggest that you are a poet, so we'll go with that! And on top of that, you are, and you came to prominence as, an activist. And here's where it gets a little bit interesting. What do you see yourself as going forward?
Mohammed El-Kurd: I like to call myself a writer because I think it's an umbrella term and I want to be able to narrate, you know? I think this is so much a battle between people, about land and about refugees and about prisoners. But it's also a fight of narration. It's a fight about who gets to tell the story. And for us as Palestinians, we live a reality that's so materially evident and yet the way that it's being articulated in the world is inaccurate is inconsistent with the reality that we live. So, I see my role as a person who is able to bridge that gap or close that chasm between the articulations that we make on the street in Arabic and the way they are reported on in English in Media. And that's my ultimate goal.
Interviewer: Ok so, you now write for The Nation. Would you, do you, write as a journalist or do you write as an opinion writer?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Journalist, purely journalists. It’s horrible!
[Laughter]
Mohammed El-Kurd: No, it's because I have such an urge to write poetically and be like, “yeah, this government sucks!” but I can't say that as a journalist. So it's taken...it's been a wonderful challenge, to be honest. You know, I wanted to report on the designation of six Palestinian, civil society organizations as terrorist organization, which is really government's latest attempt to stifle Palestinian documentation and analysis. And I ended up interviewing about 24 people for the essay, just because it didn't feel like I was qualified to speak about it without being biased.
And that kind of insecurity that came with me becoming a journalist after being a poet is, you know, it's a small burden of insecurity, but it's also very helpful because it pushes me to be rigorous in the way I report.
Interviewer: You've now crossed the line from being able to freely express yourself to now having to work within a structure that includes, I assume, editors?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yes!
Interviewer: Perhaps even the legal and standards department...
Mohammed El-Kurd: Fact-checkers
Interviewer: Fact checkers! Welcome to the world of American media! By the way, lets be honest, that exists in every news organization! It exists at Al-Jazeera, it exists in European news organizations, so as much as we want to pretend that that doesn't exist, there are layers in the process.
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah
Interviewer: What has that been like for you as someone who I remember went on TV and social media and said the things that you said, can you now say them in the same context, in the same way as a journalist?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah, my fact-checker is always like “source?” and I'm just like, “what do you mean? I'm telling you the truth!”
[Laughter]
Interviewer: It's like, “it's my house I live here! I can tell you what's happening.” (Jokingly) “Do you have a second source in your house who can confirm to you that the gas actually landed inside the house?”
Mohammed El-Kurd: But you know, this is true. There are fact checkers. There's my editor. Who's wonderful. But my editor who's like constantly asking me for sources-
Interviewer: And have they been on the ground? Have they ever been to Jerusalem?
Mohammed El-Kurd: No, I don't think so, but for me, it hasn't been a challenge to voice my opinions because facts are facts. What's happening on the ground is what's happening on the ground.
So by simply portraying things appropriately, by simply rendering the painting of this power imbalance very accurately, people make up their own conclusions. And often these conclusions are aligned with my own opinions because the facts on the ground, scream of asymmetry, scream of oppression and scream of injustice.
Interviewer: What have you learned so far about the structural challenges working for an American publication? Like The Nation, which we should note is progressive. It is left-leaning. But what have you learned about the structural challenges?
Mohammed El-Kurd: I mean, my editor is wonderful. I love her to death. The source of the challenges has just been like the bureaucracy of this, it is just waiting until we're able to get something out. And then just like the extra task of, you know, putting a hyperlink, every few words, hyperlinking them to death!
Interviewer: So it's been more processed than it is editorial, you would say?
Mohammed El-Kurd: I haven't had problems editorially with my editor. And I think I just got lucky. I've worked with many different news outlets to publish opinion pieces and even as an opinion writer you are challenged on your own opinions. So, I was very surprised to see that I'm not being challenged on my reporting as much with my well by my editor, but I think she's just on the right side of history!
Interviewer: Would you be allowed to go, and would you want to go and cover Israel? If The Nation called you and said, “we want to send you to do a story”, you can because you have an east Jerusalem ID. You can go to Tel Aviv. You can go report inside Israel in 1948 lines. Even if you can't get to Gaza and have a hard time getting into the West Bank, would you go cover Israel?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah. Yeah. Their politics are just as corrupt. Yeah.
Interviewer: But you would do it? You have no reservations about reporting.
Mohammed El-Kurd: No
Interviewer: Okay.
Mohammed El-Kurd:I mean I think the Palestinian stories are much more valuable, but it would do it if it was my job.
Interviewer: Yeah, I know. I mean, I think that the challenge is when you get an assignment and you have to report on it from across. I was just curious to know if you would, so yeah.
Mohammed El-Kurd: I would yeah.
Interviewer: You talked about the broader media landscape in the US, and we will open it up to questions in a little bit. So I, if you have questions, we'll take them shortly. I don't want to-
Mohammed El-Kurd: That one was really hard! I had to think on my feet!
Interviewer: Listen, it's a, it's a friendly crowd here, I mean, I don't think anyone is going to be upset if you say you have to go cover Israel. I mean, but I would be curious to get your thoughts on the broader American media. Now you have been in the U S as you said, you've lived four years here. You are now...are you based here or do you go back and forth?
Mohammed El-Kurd: I go back and forth. I study here and then I go…
Interviewer: So when you see the coverage in the United States, broadly speaking, what are some of your critiques? Don't hold back!
Mohammed El-Kurd: Just in general?
Interviewer: In general, you can be as specific as you want, or as general-
Mohammed El-Kurd: I think the media industry in this country is very outrage-based. Or outrage-informed. And there's a lot of...I don't know, I'm not the best person to answer questions regarding how much corporations are involved with newsmaking in this country, but I do...there is this impression that I get from watching the news here, that there's an incentive to make money. And there's a sensationalism that happens. This was certainly true with the Trump years. And today you have American people divided into two groups and they're just screaming at each other from across the aisle (aside to the audience) forgive me. That's the main problem. And yani, I think one of the biggest problems in American media today is that some Islamophobia or like just anti-Arab racism across the board and I think that needs to be addressed. I'm sure there are other problems, but these are the ones I feel most immediately as a Palestinian, as an Arab,
Interviewer: And when you see the story about Israel and Palestine and what is happening on the ground portrayed here, what do you think is missing narratively from the coverage?
Mohammed El-Kurd: The truth.
[Laughter]
Yeah. I mean, you have a concerted effort on the ground to silence Palestinian voices. You have a leaked internal memo from DW, which is a German broadcasting organization, sorry it's not American, but it's all Western, it's fine! You have that sending their employees, an internal memo saying, “you're not allowed to say apartheid. You're not allowed to say settler colonialism.” Then you have the owner of Politico saying, “if you want to work for me, you have to support Israel.” This news just broke a few weeks ago. You know this, you see this, I every single time I sent something to The New York Times or they asked me for something, they sent it back and it's completely, you know, defanged and deformed.
I did a podcast for the Washington post and they edited every single time I said ‘apartheid’. Which I understand at that point apartheid was not, you know...
Interviewer: Was this pre-Human Rights Watch report and pre-B’Tselem report?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yes. So my voice didn't matter then because Human Rights [Watch’s] report didn't legitimize it.
[Laughter from audience]
So I understand why they took it out! They took out ‘settler colonialism’, I understand. Fine. But then they edited out ‘occupation’-
Interviewer: Not to disagree with you, but I just want to ask you this - I'm not disagreeing with you - Could it possibly be that your editors were saying the word ‘apartheid’ is a legal description of a reality on the ground, and you may not have the legal authority to declare it as an apartheid?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Well, they took out ‘occupation’ as well. And that was an internationally recognized reality.
Interviewer: No for sure. I mean, that's why I said I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just trying to (inaudible)....did you ask them, why are you taking out the word ‘apartheid’? Why is it inappropriate to use the word ‘apartheid’?
Mohammed El-Kurd: No, I didn't ask them. I was very offended. I just hung up the phone!
[Laughter]
No, but yani they didn't tell me the podcast was going to be narrated by an Israeli. So I was like, “yeah, and our house is getting taken over by settlers” and then there's this voice “ACTUALLY, what Mohamad is saying here…” And it's this person, an American Israeli person just giving his opinions about my own life! Right? And that's the large issue that you have in American media. There are other...like there have been portrayals that have been great and good and objective, like, coming on your show was great! Friendly! Democracy Now has been-
Interviewer: Don't say that! Don't say friendly.
Mohammed El-Kurd: Oh, sorry. Neutral! Objective!
Interviewer: You can say whatever you want. I'm joking. It's totally fine!
Mohammed El-Kurd: Ok.
Interviewer: You know, I had Mark Regev on after I interviewed you so-
Mohammed El-Kurd: I saw, he was embarrassed!
[Laughter]
Interviewer: And at the end of the day, as I said in the beginning, it's about widening the conversation and hearing from everybody, which is why before anyone had heard your name in the U S in November of last year, before this became a story, you were on the show.
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yes, I'm very grateful for that.
Interviewer: Well, I mean, at the end of the day, it was a story on the ground and we've been trying to put the spotlight on it so... But continue with what you were saying; you did the podcast, there was somebody on the other side and you felt that it was a bit of an ambush or...?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah it felt like entrapment to be honest. I was angry about it, but whatever. And then I did an interview for NBC news and they took out all of my analysis. And they just said like “oh, we're going to lose their homes. I'm so sad.” But there was no explanation why it was so sad! And this is a larger problem, like with the HRW stuff, you know, I appreciate that. By no means do I want to critique the report itself. But these organizations reach these miraculous epiphanies decades after Palestinians have already articulated them!
[Laughter] No for real!
Interviewer: Yeah.
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yani you know I know many people that work for HRW and they're called field researchers and they're the people who go and meet and collect all of the data and blah, blah, blah. And then somebody else gets to slap their names on it. But if you actually listened to Palestinians, hear what we have to say in terms of framework, in terms of analysis, you could reach your conclusions, decades and decades earlier as a human rights organization, because we have been telling you! But for them, we are just the raw material from which they extract their conclusions. And you know, at worst you're “angry”, if you're going TV and you tell your opinion, and at best you're “passionate”, but they never considered that you are a reliable narrator, you know?
Interviewer: And so I guess you're now calling for Western media organizations to have a presence in the occupied territories?-
Mohammed El-Kurd: They all do. Most of them.
Interviewer: You mean specifically Palestinian reporters?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yes.
Interviewer: I mean, I know our organization certainly has. We employ Palestinians, we have people there on the ground. So why do you think it's still not enough that those voices that work within these organizations are able to have the kind of impact that would lead to, as you're saying the truth being reported?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Well you know, it’s not so much a question of quantity, rather a question of who has the authority to narrate. If ABC news hires me and gives me a camera and tells me to go - well, I'm not a photographer - If ABC news hires me and tells me to go to do a report in Ramallah and I'm covering protests against the PA, but then ABC news decides how the story is going to be told, then ultimately ABC news has the authority to narrate, not the people on the ground. So I want to see that power dynamic shift in American media institutions simply because we are just more - as Palestinians - we are just more suitable and fitted to report on Palestinian issues than non-Palestinians.
Interviewer: Fair enough. So, does that mean, and this is not to criticize anyone involved in this, shouldn't the argument be made to have more Palestinian Americans in the newsrooms here than those on the ground?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Both, the more the merrier! We should do a Palestinian takeover of the media industry!
[Laughter]
Interviewer: Again, no comment.
[Laughter]
Interviewer: No, but I’m serious, like from now that you've been on this side of it, if you're trying to diagnose the problem and you're saying, “look, there are news organizations. I worked for CNN. They have a team there. They have Palestinian journalists on the ground. They have people in غزة [Gaza], I covered غزة [Gaza] for CNN, as a producer. They have, Al Jazeera English does, Al Jazeer Arabic does, the BBC does, MSNBC and NBC does. So it's not just about having a camera on the ground, there seems to be another layer to this?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yes. The structural change, right? Like, again, it's a question about authority. You should allow the Palestinians in the newsroom. If the articulation is being sculpted here in a newsroom in New York, then you should allow a Palestinian to be in that newsroom. It's about having Palestinian influence over not, not necessarily influence, it's just having Palestinian sight over the headlines that are being reported because so much they are misleading, so much this information, and oftentimes they're influenced by Israeli propaganda. This is well-documented as well. So I'm not asking ABC news or CNN to give me, you know, to give me their company. I wish! No I’m kidding-
[Laughter]
Mohammed El-Kurd: But I'm asking for Palestinians, for a Palestinian like me, to have the authority to narrate what's happening on the ground. Not just to record it, and not just to report it, not just to report the facts but also narrate, create the framework to do the framing.
Interviewer: Okay. Fair enough. But let me play devil's advocate here for a second.
Mohammed El-Kurd: Okay. Oh my god!
[Laughter]
Interviewer: And I'm going to open up, last question! It sounds like you're saying Palestinians should tell the story?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yes.
Interviewer: I don't think a lot of people in this room would disagree with you. Doesn't that eventually lead us down a road where Palestinians tell Palestinian stories, blacks tell black stories, Latinos tell Latino stories. And then we become an identity based news environment where the only people who can tell the stories are those that have a similar identity? And at that point, what are we left with?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Well, to answer your question, this is not really an identitarian issue, right? There is, and we have a lot in common with the black struggle, with other marginalized struggles, but in our particular case, we are speaking about representation of Palestinian current affairs in American media, where there's clearly a chasm where there's clearly asymmetry and whereas there's clearly a concerted effort to silence and stifle Palestinian advocacy. And right now the remedy that I'm proposing for that is allowing Palestinians more authority in the narration. I'm not saying a non-Palestinian cannot narrate a Palestinian story-
Interviewer: I mean, some of the, some of the most prominent voices are Israeli journalists that write on behalf of Palestinians. Correct?
Mohammed El-Kurd: I mean I wouldn't agree with this. I think the most prominent voices are Palestinians who just don't get their foot in the door. There's that privilege that comes with being an Israeli where you can go to CNN and say, “I want to write about this injustice in Palestine” because you are more palatable to an American audience as an Israeli. They say, “oh, he's likely Jewish. He's not Palestinian.” There's this idea that you're unbiased and blah, blah, blah. But again, nothing Israeli journalists say on behalf of us is miraculous. And if we [had been allowed to] say it, then it would have reached decades and decades ago.
Interviewer: Okay. All right, well, let's open it up. I think we've had a good conversation. I'd love to get a few questions from you guys before we wrap it up. And if you don't mind standing up so we can see you, and if you do have questions. Do we have questions from the audience? Anyone? There's a gentleman right here, please. And I apologize that we don't have microphones, but you can go ahead and I will repeat the question if I hear it.
Interviewer: Uh, there's a lady.
Q&A Audience member: Hi my name is Nerdeen Kiswany...I was thinking along the last of the lines of your last question Ayman, on identitarian journalism which brings me to ask what other objectives or demands do we as Palestinians or as people who support Palestine, have of the media besides, hiring Palestinians on the ground because of the several issues that you raised throughout your talk? I mean if every single media org hires a Palestinian, but then controls what they say, wouldn’t they be controlling the narrative further, meanwhile getting legitimization for simply having a Palestinian correspondent? And that's not to discourage having more Palestinian correspondents, but what are ways that we can put further pressure on them in meaningful ways that don’t rely on the identity or the personal politics of any individual journalist?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Yeah, I don't disagree with this at all. And this is what I was saying about the difference between just tokenizing a journalist, tokenizing, a Palestinian, and giving them like a camera versus giving them the authority and alongside authority creating structural change that's right. The same way we see journalists being barred from saying “occupation” or “apartheid”, we should actually implement structural changes where when you report on Israel you'd call it an apartheid state because that's what it is.
When you report on the Israeli forces, you do not call them Israeli Defense Forces because within that name, there's propaganda in itself, right? There's all of these ways that you can implement structural changes, I can’t think of them on my feet right now, but I do not at all disagree with you because yes, there is a way that this could be exploited into identitarian and tokenizing and I definitely do not call for that..
Q&A Audience member: Hi, my name is Jada. I’m with ABC News. As a Palestinian journalist - I've only been there for two years (inaudible)- Sometimes I feel like, you know, as Palestinians who are kind of just getting into this field we worry about being “biased” saying that one thing that might just kill our story, kill basically us, the whole story. So I guess my question is how do you get through that? Because you know, a lot of people - especially Israelis - they say, “oh, well, they are just being antisemitic!” That tends to be their line of defense. So how can Palestinian journalists who are still starting out in the field combat that line of “defense”?
Mohammed El-Kurd: Okay. I love this question, it's my favorite one!
[Laughter]
Let's be very clear here. Antisemitism is real. The fact that I have to clarify that I believe it’s real is the problem. There is this assumption that we Palestinians do not believe in anti-Semitism as a real issue and we are constantly being put in the corner, being forced to defend ourselves. The baseline is we are facing - I say this as a Palestinian now not as a journalist - the baseline is I am facing oppression and I should not be the defendant in a conversation when I'm speaking about my oppression.
When we're talking about antisemitism it is very clearly, and has been articulated by many people by many Jewish people, as a smear tactic. And the weaponization of antisemitism, the accusation of antisemitism has been used as a smear tactic. The Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs officially calls it “discrediting the message by way of discrediting the messenger” this is official state language! So when we are confronted by this baseless accusation, if it is baseless, we should call it as such! We should not be rendered to the corner, apologizing for it, but we should call it out. And I know it's hard, like I say this and it's oversimplified, but quite frankly, it's hard, but it's never going to be as hard as living under occupation! And for me my loyalty lies within the Palestinian people and I'm not going to fail them just because I'm scared of a hard, difficult conversation with my editor.
Interviewer: All right, and with that we conclude this portion of the evening. I'll hand it over to Mike.
