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
You know, as it looked like before the Israeli state emerged, I mean, we should be reading our history here. When you read like European and white Historians, they'll tell you Palestine was barren. Many of them would say it was even without a people. Nobody was there. Some of them will say we were uncivilized.
But the fact of the matter is Palestine, Jerusalem particularly, had a diversity of religion. Druze, Jewish people. My grandmother continues to talk about... Well, she continued until she died. She continued to talk about her Jewish... neighbors when she was born in the old city and then her Jewish neighbors in Haifa.
We even had one Jewish member of our family, M. Sammy actually, who just also recently passed away. Jews were a part of Palestine and they spoke Hebrew, a different kind of Hebrew, but they spoke Hebrew. People really need to read The Hundred Years War on Palestine. It's really an excellent synopsis of the history.
But this whole idea that this is some kind of war between two religions is so misleading, because what's happening is a bunch of, frankly, European settlers with a certain political secular ideology came and relocated here and turned it into a religious conflict between people who have lived harmoniously together for decades before that.
And the whole idea, be it Christian Zionism or John Hagee or the calls for Jews to leave the United States and relocate in Israel, or recently, which we've heard about a long time ago, But recently an Israeli historian confirmed the fact that Israeli organizations were bombing Baghdad and bombing synagogues in Iraq to get Iraqi Jews to leave and come relocate in Israel, right?
All of this is manufactured. And again, none of this is a conspiracy theory. I know it sounds absurd. And, you know, anytime I like look at my life from a bird's eye view, I think what a circus. But it's real and it's... It's verifiable, call the fact checkers.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So our small victory in the Israeli courts was that they would keep us in our homes until a land registry is completed. Basically, it means that they have to check who owned the land prior. And then they could decide if the land is ours or the land belongs to the Israeli settler organizations that are headquartered in the United States and enjoy a tax exempt status here.
And that sounds great on the surface, but then you look at Israeli law, you look at Israeli courts, you look at ownership and you see that, oh, Israelis refuse to authenticate or take into consideration any land ownership documents from the prior of the establishment of the state. So all of us in Jerusalem who have their taboo papers, their ownership papers from the Ottoman era,
That's not legit in the eyes of the Israeli court because that existed before, like your ownership deeds existed long before Israel even existed. So we're not going to take this into consideration.
So not to be cynical here, but unfortunately, the likely result of the land registry is that they're going to say, oh, all of this land belongs to these Jewish organizations because they're not going to take any of our documents into consideration. But that means that there's going to be another campaign and there's going to be a long-winded fight. And we'll see what happens. But that's the fear.
And there's a huge dreadful fear of a massive loss in property in Jerusalem following this land registry for the reasons I just told you. It's the mere fact that they just refuse to look at land ownership documents.
I always make a joke that being in an Israeli court is like playing a game of broken telephone, because everybody's speaking in Hebrew, and then your lawyer says something to your dad, and your dad says something to your mom, and your mom whispers it in your ear, and then you say it to your cousin, and your cousin has a completely different idea of the verdict than what the verdict is, but that's really the reality.
No, it's like groups. So like in our case, it's like four houses, every four houses. But again, it happens in a language we do not speak. And a lot of the time our strategy is buying time and, you know, building a global campaign. Like we know that there is no recourse in the Israeli courts.
I mean, my grandmother used to say, and this is like a popular proverb, if your enemy is the judge, to whom do you complain?
Yeah, I mean, in our case, it was the international community, but in our case also, it wasn't just the international community. It was the hundreds of thousands of people in Palestine and abroad who were marching on the streets, getting beaten and brutalized in Jerusalem. And I don't know, sometimes arrested in places like Germany and so on and so forth.
who forced themselves inside the media cycle. This was what was unique about Sheikh Jarrah. We were able to penetrate an industry that usually ignores us and usually refuses to use any of our framing, any of our quotations. And these people that...
these people that spread the rhetoric, spread the facts, wrote articles, these people that made videos online and got arrested, and many of whom are still in Israeli prisons paying higher prices than I have ever paid, these people are the ones that truly moved the international community into action. It wouldn't have.
The United States, I don't think, would have said anything had it not been for the immense media pressure that was created from the immense popular pressure. There are a lot of moving parts to a global campaign. And I think it's so impressive that we were able to do this without any media backing, without any institutional backing, without any training, without any budget, nothing.
The role is perpetuating what's happening, Yanni. It's all a negative role, to be honest.
Yeah, it's like the 3.8 billion in military aid every year. It's the standing ovation.
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