Thread by @luminatus1

“I’m not scared of the ADL or its predictable, racist smear campaigns,” he said. “
It has no moral authority over me or any advocate of Palestinian liberation. I will not negotiate my vocabulary, let alone my character, with defenders of #Zionism, #colonialism, and #apartheid

“I will not negotiate my vocabulary, let alone my character, with defenders of Zionism, colonialism, and apartheid. One look at the organization’s shameful history is enough to strip it of any legitimacy its deceptive name might offer it.”

theintercept.com/2022/04/29/pal…

The letter of support also argued that the controversy over the poem was changing the subject: discussions about Palestinians’ actual living conditions in the Occupied Territories were being supplanted by debates over wording.

“The cause of Palestinian liberation is buried under bad faith interpretations of El-Kurd’s poetry. A single metaphorical line, subject to interpretation, becomes prioritized over the vile condition of Palestinian unfreedom,” it said.

El-Kurd told The Intercept that his poem was referring to the documented historical event in Israel-Palestine cited in the footnotes. He also said that as a teenager learning to write poetry, his teachers had encouraged him to use metaphorical language.

“It’s a metaphor, it’s not something I literally believe. I’m just now realizing that they actually think, or are pretending to think for purposes of exaggeration, that I actually believe Israelis eat Palestinian organs. At first it was comical, but now it seems very sinister,”

At first it was comical, but now it seems very sinister,” El-Kurd said. “The line is about the practice of withholding Palestinian bodies & using them as bargaining chips & in the past, exploiting the bodies in ways that have been documented & are widely discussed.

“The line is about the practice of withholding Palestinian bodies and using them as bargaining chips and in the past, exploiting the bodies in ways that have been documented and are widely discussed. It’s not a conspiracy theory.”

He added, “At the time I wrote it, I was writing more literally about the practice of withholding bodies, but my teachers told me to make it more abstract and to use artistic language.”

El-Kurd said that the ADL never reached out or attempted to engage him about concerns that the group had with his writing. (The ADL did not respond to a request for comment.)

Instead, with the dossier and the campaign to get his event at Georgetown canceled, the ADL has focused on trying to push him out of the public debate on Israel-Palestine entirely.

There’s no denying that El-Kurd grew up angry. A young Palestinian from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, he has spent his entire life fighting against the Israeli government’s attempt to evict him and his neighbors from their homes.

When he was 11 years old, a group of hard-line Israeli settlers, including some with origins in the U.S., moved into a portion of his family home and tossed his family’s possessions into the street

theintercept.com/2022/04/29/pal…

The settlers have remained there ever since. To this day, they are pushing to evict his family entirely. His involvement on Israel-Palestine issues has been forced by circumstances that have shaped his life since childhood.

People who have worked in advocacy on Israel-Palestine also point out that it’s unreasonable to expect a 23-year-old to know how to navigate sophisticated speech codes around the conflict in the United States, or to immediately tar them as antisemites if they don’t

“There are elaborate and ever-shifting speech codes that are constantly retrofitted to try and equate any form of Palestinian criticism of Zionism with antisemitism,”

theintercept.com/2022/04/29/pal…

Munayyer said. “Those of us who operate in the American debate around this issue are forced to be very aware of the many ways that one’s legitimate criticism of Zionism can be misconstrued in bad faith as antisemitic speech.”

The ADL dossier that triggered the uproar against El-Kurd does acknowledge that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is intensely personal for El-Kurd” and that his family has been “entangled in a long-standing political & property dispute that has left them under threat of eviction

that has left them under threat of eviction by Israel for years.”

Under Greenblatt’s leadership, the ADL has taken liberal stances on some issues. The group has even taken steps to make amends for some past controversies: In 2021, Greenblatt issued a public apology for the ADL’s

In 2021, Greenblatt issued a public apology for the ADL’s decision to oppose the construction of a mosque in Lower Manhattan, saying on behalf of the org, “We were wrong, plain & simple.” Greenblatt has also stridently called out Donald Trump and the far right, something for

“We were wrong, plain and simple.” Greenblatt has also stridently called out Donald Trump and the far right, something for which he has been attacked by conservatives.

The controversy over El-Kurd may make it harder for even a rebranded ADL to make new allies. Many progressives today are sympathetic to Palestinian suffering, & the knee-jerk attempt to “cancel” El-Kurd, including w a coordinated media blitz, is unlikely to endear them to the ADL

For his part, El-Kurd says that the attacks on him, which characterize his expressions of outrage as bigotry, paint a one-sided picture that doesn’t reflect the real-world violence that he & his family suffer at the hands of the Israeli settler movement & the govt tht supports it

My family is threatened by expulsion every day, and all I’ve ever known is life under Israeli occupation,” El-Kurd said. “All I’ve known is tear gas and beatings and police abuse.”

theintercept.com/2022/04/29/pal…