Mohammed El-Kurd: evaluation

Transcript context

…The wall is a nine meter high cement wall that was finished in 2003. And if you’re American, you’ve probably heard the whitewash sanitized version of the name, which is the security wall. But it’s the wall that literally has stolen thousands of dunams of land and has ripped apart families. My mother is a poet or was a poet at some point, and she had this poem she published in the paper called Love Behind the Wall. It’s a poem, but it describes the real life situation of two families who lived right across the street from each other, but were then separated by the wall, and they would fly balloons to see each other from each side of the wall or something like that. This, although it sounds absurd, but it’s the reality for many Palestinian families whose lives were torn apart, whose livelihoods also were torn apart by the wall. Maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about the legal classifications for Palestinians. Israel, much like any other colonial entity, has divided and fragmented the Palestinian people. As I said earlier, I have a blue ID, which means I’m a resident. A friend of mine who lives in Haifa, for example, two hours away from me, 150 kilometers, not nothing too bad in this country, has an Israeli citizenship. He can travel, he can enter the West Bank, he can do a lot more. He’s a citizen, he can vote if he wants to, not that we want to. I always say to my friends, “Oh, you can go to Italy without a visa because you have an Israeli citizenship.” But they battle national eraser. They battle crime in their own communities because of police negligence. They battle land confiscation, and have battled land confiscations in the ’50s. Whereas somebody with a green ID, somebody from the West Bank cannot leave the West Bank, cannot go anywhere without a special permit and lives behind these walls. The West Bank, I think hilariously George Bush described it as Swiss cheese because of the holes. Every a hundred meters there’s a new settlement or there’s a new military checkpoint. So even if you live behind the wall in the West Bank with your green ID, even though you’re robbed of your right to movement, you still even can’t move from town to town within the West Bank without encountering settler violence or military violence while you’re crossing the checkpoints and so on and so forth. t to movement, you still even can’t move from town to town within the West Bank without encountering settler violence or military violence while you’re crossing the checkpoints and so on and so forth. And then the last category we have is people who live in Gaza, we are talking about over 2 million people who live in an open air prison, who have no right to movement, but also have no access to clean water and no access to supplies, no access to good food, no access to good healthcare, and so on and so forth, who routinely get bombarded every few years. Gaza is two hours away from my house. It feels like an absolute far away planet because it’s so isolated from the rest of the country. So imagine all of these different legal statuses fragmenting your everyday identity, and creating different challenges and obstacles for you to deal with, for each group to deal with. It’s amazing and impressive that despite these colonial barriers, the real cement ones and the barriers in the mind, despite all of these barriers, the Palestinian people have maintained their national identity for 70 years. That is incredibly impressive. And it also sends a message that as long as we have a boot on our neck, we are going to continue fighting. Violence, cracking down on refugee camps, bombarding refugee camps is only going to bring about more violence. So West Bank is a large region where a lot of Palestinian people live, and then there are settlements sprinkled throughout, and those settlements have walls around them with security cameras.…

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