Innocent Palestinians Forced From Their Homes, Survivor Speaks Out
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What is Mohammed El-Kurd's background and expertise?
All right, joining me today is Mohammad El-Kurd. He is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and writer. He's an editor at large at Mondeweiss and the first Palestine correspondent at The Nation magazine. His most recent book, Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal is out now and he brought me my very own copy. Mohammed, you were born and grew up in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. When you were 11 years old, half of your home was taken over under an Israeli court order. What happened? Did you have to share your house?
Yeah, I mean, share is kind of an amicable word. It was, you know, we were forced to live in half of our home, the other half was taken by settlers. But to kind of paint an image, I want to say as absurd as it sounds, this is a reality that many, many, many thousands of Palestinians live with. Our house in our neighborhood received so much media attention because we live in such a central neighborhood that was surrounded by all these international embassies and consulates. So all these diplomats would watch us be constantly brutalized and terrorized by the Israeli military from their balcony. So our house and our neighborhood became the center of attention. But what happened was all of our families in our neighborhood, 28 families, they were all dispossessed, forcibly expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba.
And then they were given these houses by the United Nations. And in the 70s, there were settler organizations, Jewish American charities actually registered here as charities. um who have sued us claiming our houses are are their own with falsified document by divine decree saying that god hang on i have to ask some questions yes please so your family owned a home yes and then a court an israeli court said you don't own this house anymore yes in the 70s and we in the 70s and then that where were these people from that came in and lived in half of your house the guy in half of my house is um from long island his name is
more questions so a person from long island new york yes can go to israel yes and jerusalem if they're jewish okay if they're jewish so i couldn't do that no you could not do that and say i want this house and who's the boss of who whose house that is who decides this why do they think somebody from new york gets to go take your families home explain this to me like i'm five
Well, I think it's pretty incestuous. Let me paint you a picture. I mean, we hear words like the court and the judicial system and eviction and legal, and we imbue these words with so much authority. But what happens is these courts are built by Israeli settlers, right? The laws, the ethnic cleansing is written into the law.
What happened to Mohammed's family home in Sheikh Jarrah?
I have been displaced from my home in accordance to Israeli laws and procedures and protocols. The guy that displaced me is a settler himself. To paint you even a more cartoonish picture, I grew up watching this guy called Yonatan Youssef walk around the neighborhood with a megaphone in his hand, chanting the most racist Islamophobic shit, right, against us. This guy was a sitting city councilman who approved and rejected housing building permit applications. For example, in Jerusalem, where I'm from, in occupied Jerusalem, if you want to build a home and you're a Palestinian, your chance of getting approved for building a home is less than 1%, right? So they control how much homes we get to build, and then they can come up and conjure up whatever fake documents to destroy the homes we already live in.
I have a question. I thought Israel was a democracy.
The best democracy in the area. So you're telling me that you didn't have the same rights as other people. Because I've been told this my whole life. No, it's... You're telling me that's a lie.
How do Israeli court orders affect Palestinian families?
No, it's not a democracy. I think anybody with the least bit of critical thought is able to tell it's not a democracy. I mean, even for Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship, there's a myriad, dozens and dozens of laws that explicitly discriminate against them. And if you even look at the Israeli nation state law,
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is Mohammed El-Kurd's background and expertise?
0:04–3:01
2
What happened to Mohammed's family home in Sheikh Jarrah?
3:01–4:11
3
How do Israeli court orders affect Palestinian families?
4:11–22:05
4
How do Israeli laws discriminate against Palestinians?
22:05–29:54
5
What is the reality of settler violence in occupied Palestine?
29:54–33:52
6
What are the psychological impacts of living under occupation?
33:52–33:54
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from IHIP News
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