Mohammed El-Kurd
speaker
488 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jul 2023
last heard 24 May
Mohammed El-Kurd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
had to live in tents on the street for many, many months and even lived in our front yards for a few months and lived in their cars.
Between the 70s and 2009, there had been many dozens of expulsions orders against us and against many other families in the neighborhood. 28 families in total, actually. And in 2008, 2009, the first wave of expulsions finally happened. It actually began with... Um Kamil Al-Kurd, we're not related but we live on the same street in the same neighborhood. She was thrown out of her home.
Her husband, an elderly man also named Muhammad Al-Kurd was pronounced dead on the spot. He had a stroke and died. The Israeli soldiers pulled him out of his home while he was urinating and threw him into the streets. And he died.
A few months later, the Ghawi and Hanoun families, which are, you know, kind of not a clan, but, you know, in Palestine, you have sometimes a building that contains multiple brothers and their wives. Each have little apartments. So the Ghawi and Hanoun families, about 35 people, were thrown out in the middle of the street right across from us.
And then by the end of 2009, I had come home from school to find all of my furniture scattered across the length of the street, and I saw the settlers, many of whom had American accents, living in our house. And their justification for this, their reasoning for this is, you know, divine decree. This is what God wants. This is the promised land.
This is so-and-so, as if God is some kind of real estate agent. So they took over half of our home, and we continued to be in courts for the following decade. I was still a child, and I had broken English, and I was talking to all of these diplomats and all of these journalists, who would subject me to their racism and biases and so on and so forth.
And I had to prove my humanity time and time again. And I had to do all of this, all with broken English. And we were lucky even if we got a quote in the article written about us by The Times or so on and so forth. Move forward to 2020, I was in New York City studying a master's degree, getting a master's degree, and my father calls me.
And he tells me, you know, we have yet another expulsion order. And we decided to launch a campaign. It was quite ambitious at the time. But the whole objective of the campaign was to demystify what is happening, right? Because it's reported on in the news, it's reported on around the world as this real estate dispute, as these evictions, which was not really what's happening.
Evictions do not entail a foreign army in an occupied territory, forcibly removing you out of your home. So I came home from New York and we launched a campaign which turned into a global success. And I believe it was a global success because finally the images on the screen matched the rhetoric that was being said. It wasn't so confusing or complicated anymore.
All of this asymmetry was pronounced and articulated in a way that any viewer, be it in Alabama, be it in New York, be it in Egypt, was able to understand the asymmetry of the judicial system and the agenda of colonialism that was taking place here. And due to immense international and diplomatic pressure, from all over the world, even the United States.
The Israeli Supreme Court was forced to cancel all of the eviction orders in Sheikh Jarrah until further notice. This, I consider, was a small victory because obviously we are still at risk of losing our homes once they decide to do the land registry, which we can get into a little bit later if you'd like. But nonetheless, it was something that we haven't seen before.
And the fact that the Supreme Court canceled all of these dozens and dozens of past eviction orders, it set a precedent. And it also proved that this was a political battle, not a legal one.
Yeah, I mean, the most important context here is that oftentimes Americans think that Israel and Palestine are some kind of two neighboring countries that live next to each other and they are at war. But the fact of the matter is, Palestinian cities exist all over the country, and it's just one country, it's just one infrastructure, and Israel is literally on top of Palestine.
It was established on top of our villages in the late 40s. Now, according to international law, the eastern part of Jerusalem is under occupation, so Israeli presence and jurisdiction over the area is completely illegitimate. They say the evictions are legal because the settlers write their laws.
So obviously they're gonna allow settlements to expand, but according to international law, according to even US policy, Israel occupies the Eastern part of Jerusalem. Its jurisdiction there is illegitimate. We shouldn't even be going to their courts in the first place, but we have no other option.
We're talking about Sheikh Jaraha, we're talking about Jerusalem, we're talking about generations and generations and generations of people who have lived there for the longest time, who now, even though, for example me, I don't have a citizenship. I'm a resident, a mere resident.
I have a blue ID card, even though my grandmother and my grandfather were born in Jerusalem, their grandparents were born in Jerusalem. even though we've lived there for generations, but Palestinians in Jerusalem, we are not citizens, we're just mere residents. Same thing with residents of the occupied Syrian Golan. They are not citizens, they are just residents in their own hometowns.
This is an important piece, but all of this gets convoluted and lost in translation, and I think I would argue a lot of the time it's dubious, it's malicious, the fact that these little pieces of context that frame the entire story get lost. You know, I'll talk to you about something else. Just 10 minutes across from my neighborhood, there's another neighborhood called Silwan.
And the people in Silwan are also threatened with expulsion, but not through evictions, but through home demolitions. And if you look at American media or Israeli state media, you would read the headlines, you know, Palestinians living in homes built illegally are going to face, you know, their homes are going to be torn apart.
what these headlines don't tell you, and even sometimes, most of the time the substance doesn't tell you, that Palestinians seldom ever get building permit applications. In fact, recently a spokesperson for the Israeli military confirmed that it was 95% of building permits applications submitted by Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank are rejected by the Israeli authorities.
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