Settlers Took Half His Jerusalem House. Mohammed El-Kurd Calls It Politics, Not Real Estate

Mohammed El-Kurd does not open with biography. He opens with a ban on using ancient books as a warrant. Whatever was written thousands of years ago, he says, no one has a right to slaughter people, pull them from their homes, and keep living there — drinking coffee on the balconies decades later with no shame, no introspection, no reflection. No one has a right, either, to keep a population in a cage: the West Bank with no freedom of movement, Gaza blockaded by water, air, and land and deemed uninhabitable by human-rights bodies including the UN.

Lex Fridman frames the guest as a Palestinian poet, writer, and journalist whose view of Israel and Palestine differs sharply from the host's earlier conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu and Yuval Noah Harari. Fridman answers critics of his interviewing style by splitting two kinds of courage. He is willing to travel and challenge anyone face to face, even at personal risk. The harder task, he says, is to be vulnerable, to listen, to walk a mile in shoes very different from his own. That, to him, is the only way.

Asked about the neighborhood where he grew up, El-Kurd calls Sheikh Jarrah typical of Palestinian neighborhoods except for the absurdity around it: threatened with colonialism, settler expansion, and forced expulsion since the early 1970s. His family, like the others there, was expelled in the Nakba of 1948 by the Haganah and other Zionist militias that later formed the Israeli military. His grandmother moved from city to city and reached Sheikh Jarrah in 1956. The United Nations and the Jordanian government, then in control of that part of Jerusalem, had built it as refugee housing. People from across Palestine rebuilt lives after the first expulsion.

In the 1970s, settler organizations — many registered in New York and the United States — claimed the houses and land "by divine decree." The judges were Israeli, the laws written by Israeli settlers, the judiciary built, he says, atop the rubble of Palestinian homes and villages. Courts took Israeli documents at face value without authentication, documents Palestinians argue are fabricated, and refused Jordanian, UN, and Ottoman papers. To anyone with common sense, El-Kurd says, that is not a real-estate dispute, the frame preferred by Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It is a political battle about demographics and social engineering: removing as many Palestinians as possible from occupied Jerusalem.

Palestinian families in Jerusalem, he says, buy time. They plead and appeal. His neighborhood collected more than fifty expulsion orders; twenty-eight families were in the fight. In 2009 the first wave landed. Rifle-wielding settlers, with police and military, shoved neighbors out around 5 a.m. with sound bombs and rubber bullets. They lived in tents for months, in the El-Kurds' front yard, in their cars. It was the most brutal thing he had seen as a child. He did not yet know his turn was next.

The first 2009 expulsion, El-Kurd says, hit Kamel el-Kurd — no relation, same street. Her husband, an elderly man also named Mohammed el-Kurd, was pulled from the house while urinating, thrown into the street, and died of a stroke on the spot. Months later the Darawi and Hanoun households, about thirty-five people in a typical Palestinian building of brothers and wives, were thrown out across the street. By the end of 2009 El-Kurd came home from school to find the family's furniture scattered the length of the street and settlers, many with American accents, living in the house. Their reason, he says, was still divine decree, the Promised Land, "as if God is some kind of real estate agent." They took half the home. The family stayed in court for the next decade.

He was still a child with broken English, talking to diplomats and journalists who, he says, subjected him to their racism and biases. He had to prove his humanity again and again. A quote in a *Times* article counted as luck. In 2020 he was in New York for a master's degree when his father called: another expulsion order. The campaign they launched was meant to demystify the story. News around the world called it a real-estate dispute, an eviction. Eviction, he says, does not describe a foreign army in occupied territory dragging you from your home.

He came back from New York. The campaign became a global success, he argues, because the images finally matched the rhetoric. The asymmetry of the judiciary and the colonial agenda could be understood in Alabama, New York, or Egypt. International and diplomatic pressure, including from the United States, forced the Israeli Supreme Court to cancel all Sheikh Jarrah eviction orders until further notice. He calls it a small victory. The risk returns when land registry proceeds. The cancellation of dozens of past orders did, he says, set a precedent and prove the fight was political, not legal.

Fridman asks him to slow down for listeners who picture Israel and Palestine as two neighboring countries at war. El-Kurd's correction is that Palestinian cities exist across one country, and that Israel was established in the late 1940s on top of Palestinian villages. Under international law, he says, East Jerusalem is occupied; Israeli jurisdiction there is illegitimate, a point he says even U.S. policy has held. Settlers write the laws that make the evictions "legal." Palestinians in Jerusalem, including him, are residents with blue ID cards, not citizens, though his grandparents were born there. The same resident status, he notes, applies in the occupied Syrian Golan.

Ten minutes from Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan faces demolitions rather than court evictions. American and Israeli state headlines, he says, announce that Palestinians in illegally built homes will see those homes torn down. What they skip is that Palestinians rarely receive building permits. A spokesperson for the Israeli military recently confirmed, he says, that 95 percent of applications from Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are rejected. The councilman who accepts or rejects them, Yonatan Yosef, is a settler-movement activist. After the expulsion of a family in the Old City he posted "Nakba now" on his official Facebook, El-Kurd says; months earlier he walked Sheikh Jarrah with a megaphone chanting the same. He has vandalized murals and screamed Islamophobic slurs. He is in the government.

Masafer Yatta in the South Hebron Hills is the rural version: Bedouin and cave-dwelling Palestinians, more than a thousand people, expelled from villages they had cultivated for generations. American copy calls it removal from a firing zone. Declassified files from the Israeli State Archives, El-Kurd says, show that in the 1980s the government classified large West Bank tracts as firing zones for the purpose of expelling residents. The judge who rules on whether they stay is himself, under international law, a settler in an illegal settlement. That is the judiciary American media has lately cast as a beacon of progress the new government is undermining. Fridman asks whether the evictions are technically legal. "So was Jim Crow," El-Kurd says. History, he adds, shows legality is not morality. In the Palestinian case, law has served to "facilitate and bureaucratize our ethnic cleansing."

Fridman asks about hate in the hearts of judges. El-Kurd's easy answer is yes, and then he declines the question. He cares about the laws they write. Demolishing a home so someone from Long Island fleeing fraud charges can live in the front yard — that, he says, is the case in his house — is hateful enough. Palestinians, he argues, run too fast to quote a slip from a prime minister or a guilty ex-soldier. Netanyahu, Jabotinsky, Herzl have all said horrible things. Material proof is on the ground, in seventy-five years of policy. He does not need a confession to know the content of a heart.

May 15, 1948, is commemorated as the Nakba's anniversary. A popular idea, El-Kurd says, is that the catastrophe neither began nor ended that year; 1948 crystallized the Zionist project in Palestine. Zionist militias that later merged into an army calling itself the Israel Defense Forces, "even though they're literally always the aggressor," committed massacres, destroyed more than 500 villages, killed more than 15,000 people, and forced a majority of Palestinians to flee. He calls that the near-total destruction of Palestinian society, ongoing in Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, and elsewhere. His grandmother told him of neighbors who fled in panic with a pillow they had mistaken for a child, then went back; she lost her husband for nine months, imprisoned. She was not only reminiscing. She was telling him it was still happening. He did not have to grow very old to see expulsion in his own front yard.

The weapon has changed. "They have replaced their artillery with the judiciary," he says, and replaced the slashing of pregnant women's bellies at Deir Yassin with laws that say you are not legally allowed to be here. Context for listeners who do not know the Nakba includes the 1917 Balfour Declaration, a British "promise" to the Zionist movement to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, "as if Palestine was the British's to give away." Inside Zionism he distinguishes schools: Israel Zangwill's "country without a people," erasing Palestinians who cultivated the land; Ze'ev Jabotinsky, more explicit, arguing that Palestinians must be fought because they love their land as "the Red Indians" loved theirs, in a paper El-Kurd titles *The Iron Wall: Colonization of Palestine Must Go Forward*. Those schools shopped for imperial backing — Ottomans, Germany, then Britain. He recommends Rashid Khalidi's *The Hundred Years' War on Palestine*, which traces the movement often in Zionists' own words. Jabotinsky founded the Irgun, responsible in El-Kurd's account for Deir Yassin and the King David Hotel bombing, and is still celebrated: streets named for him, Netanyahu honoring him in public two weeks before the taping.

What about historical right stretching across centuries? El-Kurd calls it a red herring. States are not usually thought of as having rights, yet the Israeli regime, in his account, enjoys an exceptionalism: a right to defend itself, a right to the land, a right to shoot 14-year-old boys because it thought they had a knife. People cite the Torah; some Zionists tell him to read the Quran. He repeats the opening: no ancient text authorizes slaughter, dispossession, and shameless occupation of someone else's balcony, or caging the West Bank and Gaza.

Fridman asks the personal question: does he have hate in his heart for Israel? El-Kurd asks why that matters. Fridman agrees that policy outranks private feeling, then argues that a human story still has hate, or the failure to see another group's humanity, at its core, and that hearts matter for any long-term future. El-Kurd would worry, he says, if he felt nothing. That would be a worry about dignity. People revolt because they cannot breathe, not because of a cultural fashion. Palestinians, most of them, he calls wonderful and hospitable — some insufferable — and he cites early letters from a Jerusalem mayor to Herzl, generous toward a man plotting to take the land, impressive and heart-wrenching. There is dignity, he says, in negating your oppressor. Asking a person who lived under Jim Crow whether they hated Jim Crow would be ridiculous.

Fridman reads from *Rifqa*: El-Kurd's father telling him anger is a luxury, to be composed, to laugh when they ask, to educate. Does anger cloud his judgment? He does not think so. The home-defense campaign worked because it was honest and refused the old advocacy of shrinking, turning the other cheek, and waiting for American lawmakers to approve Palestinian humanity. At 14 he flew to Congress and the European Parliament, thinking he must be a brilliant child. Looking back he had broken English and no talking points. Kids with PowerPoints, he concluded, are sent because American politicians will not sit with Palestinian adults as equals; children do not trigger the same bias against Muslims and Arabs, a racialization that covers Palestinians who are not all Muslim, and that is why women's and children's deaths are emphasized as if men's deaths do not count. Loaded words like *anger* and *hate* mischaracterize and delegitimize. Real anger is a bulldozer through the house, an 18-year-old soldier who strip-searches him at every chance. He is proud of a generation that will not bow. Religion, he adds when Fridman asks, is a convenient marketing frame for an ancient feud. Many Zionist pioneers and Israeli leaders have been atheists. The fight is about land and people forced from homes.

Netanyahu told Fridman that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. El-Kurd watched about twenty minutes of that episode and stopped. He rejects the line. Netanyahu's analogy — opposing a Jewish state is like saying Americans may not have a country — fails twice, he argues: Jews are a religious group, American is a nationality of many religions; and the claim that states have a "right to exist" pulls the camera off people shot in the street, millions besieged, homes lost, prisoners held without trial. Opposing a young, secular, colonial political movement, in the words of its own authors, is not the same as opposing a religion thousands of years old. Israeli politicians find it convenient to call that opposition bigotry.

The same Netanyahu, El-Kurd says, has no problem shaking hands with Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, who has called Hitler a hunter sent to hunt the Jews and said Jewish people will perish in hell — claims El-Kurd calls Google-verifiable. Hagee is among the Israeli regime's closest allies. Christian Zionism, in this telling, wants Jews out of the United States so Armageddon can proceed. The regime, he concludes, does not oppose antisemitism when it serves; it opposes the kind that does not. The accusation is a muzzle on Palestine advocacy. People get stuck in disclaimers while, the morning of the taping, another child was shot. He himself has been labeled an antisemite by the ADL. Surface readers see a condemnation; they do not see, he says, the country's largest nongovernmental police-training operation, racial profiling, surveillance of Black liberation and anti-apartheid activists, or advice after Charlottesville that local police spy on Black organizers opposing white supremacists chanting antisemitic slogans. He points listeners to droptheadl.org and, joking, to the "Apartheid Defense League."

Fridman asks about Jew-hatred across history, especially Nazi Germany. El-Kurd says it is obviously wrong, and that having to clarify as much does not sit well. An ADL criticism of his tweets analogizing Israel and Hitler, Fridman notes, charged him with diminishing Hitler's evil. El-Kurd calls Hitler deplorable, rotten, belonging in hell — that goes without saying — and still claims the right to analogy. He does not even think the analogy is good strategy. The context was 2021, soldiers, police, and settlers burning the neighborhood. He also tweeted that he hoped every one of them died, a line still used as a gotcha, as if he owed apple pie to soldiers throwing tear gas into the house. Palestinian exceptionalism, as he names it, forbids analogy, expression, armed resistance, peaceful resistance, and boycott, now illegal in many U.S. states. If he cannot boycott, cannot pick up a rifle, cannot tweet frustration, what is he allowed? Maybe Netanyahu can send a manual.

Fridman turns the violence around: Israelis killed in terrorist attacks. El-Kurd says it depends on the definition. He does not fully subscribe to "one man's freedom fighter." If a foreign army that is not supposed to be in the neighborhood fires live ammunition at his house, he is allowed to do what he is allowed to do. Ukrainians defending homes, mixing Molotovs on Sky News, a *New York Times* psychologist calling hatred of all Russians a healthy outlet, a *New York Post* headline for a "heroic Ukrainian suicide bomber" — Palestinians, he says, would not dream of that coverage. They are told to live without clean water, movement, permits, or a guarantee of not being shot, and to do nothing. Anyone watching, he says, understands that if someone attacks your home you fight back. Who names whom a terrorist is a question of who writes the laws. American action in Iraq is not called terrorism by American politicians. Violence in a uniform, in English, with blonde hair, becomes movies and games; without a uniform, with an accent and a beard, it is terrorism.

Is violence effective? In general, historically, he thinks it has been; he believes in fighting on all fronts. Violence alone will not bring change. Culture, public opinion, media, diplomacy, and politics all matter. He would be naive to ignore the imbalance: makeshift weapons against one of the world's most sophisticated armies. He does not know how effective violence can be in this case. Turning the other cheek has been tried, generation after generation. The Palestinian Authority, he says, has given up inch after inch, acre after acre, deal after deal, and there is still no peace. Obstacles to coexistence, asked directly, start with occupation, siege, and a stacked judiciary. A lawyer friend, Roberto Barilla, gives him a formula: recognition, return, and redistribution. Millions of refugees, thousands of prisoners — hundreds without charge — journalists and medics killed in daylight. Peace comes when they stop killing us and stop keeping us in a cage. Return means the right of refugees to go home, including his grandmother's house in Haifa, now a restaurant. Since the 1960s, he says, some 90 percent of historic Palestine has been classified as state land, Jewish-only towns keep appearing, and not one new Palestinian town has.

The wall finished in 2003 is nine meters of cement, sold to Americans as a "security wall," in his account a theft of thousands of dunams that ripped families apart. His mother published "Love Behind the Wall," a poem about neighbors who flew balloons to see one another. Legal statuses fragment the people: his blue ID makes him a Jerusalem resident; a friend in Haifa is a citizen who can enter the West Bank and joke about visa-free Italy, while fighting crime, neglect, and land confiscation; a green ID from the West Bank cannot leave without a permit. George Bush called the West Bank Swiss cheese. Even behind the wall, every hundred meters there is a settlement or a checkpoint. Gaza's more than two million people live, he says, in an open-air prison, bombarded every few years, two hours from his house and a planet away. That the national identity has held for seventy years under those barriers is, to him, the message that a boot on the neck will be fought. Jenin, in July 2023, saw what he calls the largest invasion since 2002: soldiers on megaphones at night telling hundreds to leave with hands up or be shot. Some of those marching, he is sure, were chased from Haifa in 1948. He was relieved his grandmother died at 103 before the next order, ashamed of the relief. Fridman reads a *Washington Post* account of the raid, Israeli claims of weapons dismantled, UN language of collective punishment, body counts on both sides. El-Kurd's first complaint is the missing word: occupation. The army, he says, has no business there. Hamas rockets, in the week of a Tel Aviv car-ramming, he frames as retaliation for a siege, not an unprovoked opening. Palestinians are not violent at the core. The world, he says, does not have a problem with violence. It has a problem with who does it.

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, he says, are not their people, as no government is. The PA, in his view, fails as a subcontractor of the Israeli regime through security coordination; it killed opposition activist Nizar Banat, and protesters in Ramallah, including El-Kurd, were beaten by PA police who were likened in the crowd to Zionism — the same analogical reflex, he notes, behind the Hitler tweet. Neither PA nor Hamas, he argues, has real power to flip the switch. Hamas won an election in 2006; he does not know if it could govern Gaza well or if Palestinians still want that. The body that can end the cage and the wall is Israel. The world he wants goes beyond nation-states, prisons, and militaries. He does not have a PowerPoint. He has a hope that war is not required.

A geographic two-state solution, he says, is not possible: Swiss cheese, settlements everywhere. It is unfair to Palestinians whose homes remain in Haifa, Nazareth, Jaffa, unfair that he would cross a border to see a cousin in Nazareth. Call it one state, two, forty-eight, or twenty-nine: refugees must return, land must come back, wealth must be redistributed, the Nakba must be recognized. That is the only way forward. Two roommate thought experiments follow. Would you stay with someone who beats you daily? Would you stay with someone who denied you even a key and now, hypothetically, shares the lease as an equal? Time will tell. He does not think they want to live with Palestinians. Israeli diplomats, he says, are skilled at flowery peace talk while policy speaks. Every uptick, many leave. He would like to see what a one-state arrangement actually does.

Fridman asks how Israel exists peacefully if many people want to destroy it. El-Kurd's first answers are concrete: do not shoot a journalist working in Jenin; do not kill a 14-year-old in his front yard. Iron-wall ideology, security fences, and talk of Iran as an existential threat sit, in his view, badly on the only nuclear-armed, most sophisticated army in the region. He took the bus to the studio. His address is Googleable. That is real insecurity for Palestinian journalists who die; they do not even have time to complain about weak institutions or healthcare. Fridman grants that existential-threat talk built the post-9/11 wars, then asks whether an Iranian bomb would be a real threat. El-Kurd asks who has the nukes now, calls the rest fearmongering, and says Israelis are obsessed with genocide because, in his account, they have enacted it. Marching to keep a settler court from taking his house is not a demand to murder all Jews. If what must be saved is a regime human-rights groups call apartheid, that, he says, describes the people who feel the threat, not him.

How many Palestinians want Israel "gone"? He asks what gone means. Ending occupation and returning land, he says, is not a bad thing. Fridman notes people live in those houses now. El-Kurd answers with coffee in living rooms that are not theirs, rightful owners still in camps. He tries not to fall into abstract mapping of every plot; he is not obsessed with ethnically cleansing anyone. He is obsessed with ending a campaign visited on his family for seven decades. A little boy from Jerusalem should jog without fearing a shot. Wanting land back does not mean cleansing another people. Should West Jerusalem and Tel Aviv stay put? Number 99 on his list. Refugees, teenagers in prison, his house, his grandmother's house in Haifa come first. "Sure," Israelis can have a home in the region — "just not in my front yard," where a settler from Long Island actually lives, as in hundreds or thousands of Palestinian homes. No one is saying Jews should not exist. He thinks religious states and nation-states are bad ideas; if they want a state, fine. That does not license Jewish supremacy at his expense. "You can have your state, just don't kill anyone. Thank you, have a good day."

Jerusalem, before the Israeli state, is the coexistence he wants people to read: Druze, Jews, his grandmother's Jewish neighbors in the Old City and Haifa, even a Jewish relative, Aunt Sammy. European settlers with a secular political ideology, he argues, relocated and turned a mixed city into a religious war. He mentions an Israeli historian's confirmation that Israeli organizations bombed synagogues in Baghdad to move Iraqi Jews to Israel. Land registry, the condition of the court's "small victory," will not, he fears, authenticate Ottoman *tabu* deeds that predate the state; settler groups based in the United States and tax-exempt there will likely be handed the land. Israeli court, he jokes, is broken telephone: Hebrew to lawyer to father to mother to cousin, and a different verdict at the end. His grandmother's proverb: if your enemy is the judge, to whom do you complain? The answer, in Sheikh Jarrah, was a global street and media campaign with no budget and no institution, people still in Israeli prisons who paid more than he has.

The United States' role, asked for positives and negatives, is in his view all negative: $3.8 billion a year in military aid, standing ovations. Fridman notes Israel is the largest U.S. aid recipient since World War II, $158 billion to date. El-Kurd sees zero interest for taxpayers who care about healthcare and Flint's water, not "funding apartheid in another country." American public opinion on Palestine is shifting drastically, he argues; Washington has not caught up. Nine members of Congress boycotted President Herzog's speech; the rest stood and clapped, ovation after ovation. He wonders whether voters notice "Israel First" politicians who prefer the Israeli regime to their districts.

Forty-nine years after Ghassan Kanafani's assassination, El-Kurd had tweeted that the writer's ideas remain timely. Kanafani, prolific, killed at about 35 or 37, was a PFLP figure and a schoolroom inspiration, secular enough that even teachers had qualms. In a famous interview he told a British journalist that talks with Israelis meant capitulation, a conversation "between the sword and the neck." His three enemies — local reactionary leadership, surrounding Arab regimes, the imperialist Zionist enemy — map, for El-Kurd, onto the PA, the Abraham Accords states, and Israel. The Accords are sold as religious reconciliation; he calls that disgusting. They are arms and economic deals. Morocco's price, he says, was recognition of its claim on Western Sahara, after Morocco recognized Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. Normalizing governments are mostly unelected monarchies. Jordan and Egypt still campaign on Palestine because that is where the public heart is. He has no interest in office, no functional body to run for, and no wish to wear a suit. On 2024 he follows U.S. elections because the world lives with them; he has no preference, though he enjoyed Cornel West berating Anderson Cooper.

Born in Jerusalem, he says his Arabic writing is stronger, but he writes in English because a chasm sits between the Palestinian street and what is said in English, by racists and by advocates. His generation is trying to fill it. He is not delusional enough to read a poem at a checkpoint and watch it catch fire. He does have a platform, and if he does not define himself, others will — definitions that have not been kind. The United States is a front for change: he can protest at the Israeli embassy without being shot. A reckoning, he thinks, is coming in the American public, more people saying not on our dime. The diaspora, potent in the 1970s and 1980s, has had a resurgence since 2021.

*Rifqa* is his grandmother's name, Arabic and Hebrew, meaning to accompany someone. He signed the book when he had little visibility and packed in young poems; it travels Jerusalem, Atlanta, Jerusalem, New York. His mother was a poet. Mornings she read lines to his father, who guessed which the Israeli military censor would red-pencil for the local paper; they laughed when the pages came back erased. Poetry was a place to speak without repercussions — except that Kanafani's car was bombed, and Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian poet with Israeli citizenship, was jailed for a Facebook poem that said "Resist, my people, resist." A land-law poem he loves, "God as a Refugee," sarcastically invites the state to confiscate mosque carpets and sell orphans whose fathers are "absent," translating the Absentee Property Law for farmers. His forthcoming book, tentatively *A Million States in One*, is less a young man's memoir than a memoir of the neighborhood: 2009 and 2020–21, Beita, the South Hebron Hills, Silwan, written with feet on the table, leaning into humor, rejecting polite suffering.

His mother said the most evil atrocity is the one that makes you laugh. After a protest around 2011, the neighborhood women sat under the fig tree. Some forty soldiers marched; everyone scattered except an aunt, now dead, who would not leave her teacups. A soldier squeezed the boy El-Kurd between a baton and a pole. It was excruciating and, in memory, funny. Finding humor, he says, is dignifying; it shows you are not so weak. The same aunt would not sleep before washing dishes. He teased her: you are going to hand them a clean house? Leave it dirty. Public framing, he says, allows Palestinians only the weeping victim. Israeli accounts on Twitter show a Gaza balcony or supermarket and ask what blockade. "The ceiling has been so lowered that we can't even afford joy anymore, or a little supermarket in the neighborhood."

On the page he is a perfectionist, stuck on sentences, unlike New York friends whose drafts are not interrupted every twenty minutes by a child shot or a Silwan demolition. Palestinian writers, he worries, live in reaction to the last crime. Isolation from the news would help; he does not practice it. In Arabic he can philosophize, including about his complicated relationship to violence. In English, people still do not believe there is an occupation, though it is an internationally recognized fact on the world's screens. He cannot say *Nakba* without a paragraph of militias, a three-tier legal system, and the army that now patrols him. That, he says, is journalism stuffed into literature, work reporters should do, except they use passive voice and omit. U.S. coverage he calls terrible, horrible, horrendous: occupied towns not named as occupied, illegal settlements not named as illegal, Israeli officials as the frame, Palestinians interviewed only when they have been beaten. A hospital Israel bombs becomes a "Hamas-run hospital," sympathy drained by the adjective. Friends at the *Times* and formerly the *Post* describe fights with editors to utter the word Palestine, even in a profile of a chef. On Palestine, he says, the rules of journalism bend. Passive voice is king.

A recent study put Palestinian depression at 52 percent; he would argue the number is much higher. Anyone in those conditions contemplates many things, not only suicide. Strength, Fridman asks? Good people around him, and he does not even call it strength. It is obligation. A travesty is underway, and a few people can talk about it to a few more. Hope comes from history: no injustice lingers in its first form forever. Occupation, colonialism, Zionism are not sustainable. Listeners may pearl-clutch. He reminds himself that Jim Crow, slavery, the Holocaust, occupied Algeria, colonial Africa were all contested, often legal, and are now called never-again. What gives him hope is belief in the inevitability of justice.

What he loves most about Palestine is unabashedness: a people told by much of the world to shrink, who do not give a shit, who keep living, resisting, writing, laughing. Martyrdom culture, as Western clips of mothers "cheering" dead sons are framed, is in his account the opposite of a death cult. Occupation kills children to break spirits; the gesture says you have not broken me. Prison culture is the same: study, degrees, even smuggled sperm, because the building was designed to break you and you walk out celebrated. Demolish a house in Jerusalem and people say they will build another. Outsiders call it resilience. He prefers stubbornness. Fridman thanks him as a man of unbreakable spirit and closes with Mandela: it always seems impossible until it is done.