Mainstreaming Anti-colonial Discourse on Palestine: Mohammed El-Kurd’s Discursive Interventions

Abstract

Palestinian activists have long maintained that the hegemonic discourse used to describe their predicament is unhelpful for understanding the nature of the so-called “conflict” in their country. They maintain that a discursive hegemony suppresses their voices and denies their lived experience. A high-profile case of a settler organization’s attempt to evict Palestinian families from their homes in Jerusalem brought visibility to a counter-hegemonic Palestinian discourse that challenges the dominant framing of the situation in Palestine/Israel. Through steadfast on-the-ground resistance that was powerfully documented online, attention was brought to an otherwise routine act of home dispossession. This study examines the counter-hegemonic discourse advanced by one of the victims of the case as an example of a growing Palestinian tendency to frame Israeli actions through the prism of settler-colonialism. The article outlines the fundamentals of this discourse and traces synergies between Palestinian narratives of injustice and those of system-critical social movements concerned with issues of racism, militarism, and capitalism to examine how power-resistance discourses challenge extant modes of knowledge production.