Haviv Rettig Gur
I don't know what all the fuss is around Mohammed El-Kurd. He's shallow, his poetry is uninspired, and his politics boil down to a fantasy that he will one day destroy another people. This post is an excellent example of his basic incompetence. He compares Zionism to Nazism (zing!) to explain that Israel should not exist. Except that no one who fought Nazism insisted that the German nation has no right to exist. The analogy doesn't prove Israel must be destroyed, but that it gets to exist irrespective of its mistakes or misdeeds. He claims that anyone who says "Israel has a right to exist" is a racist. Here I kind of agree with him. No one confers upon us a "right" to exist. Our existence on this earth, our identity and our homeland are their own justification. The very idea that it's a debate, that our existence stands in judgment before the world, is racist. And yes, I'm a big fan of Palestinian independence too, if anyone's asking. El-Kurd is a shallow extremist peddling the dumbest version of 1960s Palestinian anti-colonialist ideology. Why do they celebrate him?
Mohammed El-Kurd
Just in case you didn’t know: “Israel has a right to exist” is a racist, anti-Palestinian dog whistle which implies the extermination of the Palestinian People. It was crafted and popularized by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and repeating it verbatim today as a genocide is waged is especially egregious and akin to saying Nazi Germany had a right to exist *while* it was carrying out the Holocaust. I cannot for the life of me figure out why any self-respecting Palestinian or Arab would let such a degrading remark slide without question—even if and particularly when it is from an ally we have put our support behind and trust in. And no, I am not allergic to power. I’m allergic to indignity.