Unveiling Israel’s injustice: Mohammed El Kurd’s Personal Story
November 1, 2023SHARE
If you haven’t seen this video yet, I encourage you to watch it to the end. @mohammedelkurd is a Palestinian whose family home was stolen from them by extremist Israeli settlers, NOT 75 years ago. Not even 20 years ago. Only in the last 10 years. He shows video footage that he captured himself as a child of his family and grandmother being thrown out of their home with the support of Israeli police and having all their world possessions strewn on the street. His family has lived in the house since 1956. Settlers tell his mother “If I don’t steal it someone else will.”
The Israeli government and blind extremists try to tell us that the Palestinians brought this hell on themselves and that they had the chance for peace and didn’t accept it. These are FALSE and misleading lies to make us feel as though the Palestinians were being treated fairly and justly by the Israeli regime.
Watch this video to see for yourself just how abusive, violent, unconscionable the Israeli regimes over the past five decades have actually been towards the rightful owners of the land and how, like most western democracies, they have confiscated the land and property of the original owners and built their own communities upon the graves of the thousands that were sacrificed defending their rights and homes. #ceasefirenow #israel #palestine #فلسطين #اسرائیل #freepalestine
English Script:
Mohamed El Kurd:
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:23:17
What would you do if you were sitting at your home and a foreign military knocked down the door, broke in and threw your furniture across the length of the street, beat up your mother, imprisoned your father, and told you that your house is now theirs. What would you do if you were told that for the rest of your life, you are going to have to live in a cage besieged? what would you do if someone saw and killed your brother for simply being who they are?
00:00:23:19 – 00:00:45:03
Me and my brothers are scared for each other, so we always try to be together because if we die together, that would be the best thing, because we can still see each other when we go to heaven. For decades, the Israeli regime has presented itself on the international stage as a victim. And to Palestinians, the image that was communicated to us is that of a completely different reality.
00:00:45:05 – 00:01:15:08
The Israeli regime does not waste an opportunity to intimidate us, to instill fear within us. There is the strong man image not only to intimidate us, but to reassure the Israeli society, who frankly needs our suffering in order to feel safe, needs images of our misery, of our bloodied and bruised young people to feel safe. Growing up Palestinian in occupied Jerusalem, it feels like you have a police officer in your bed and a police officer on your couch and a police officer in your kitchen.
00:01:15:09 – 00:01:41:02
There is so much surveillance of every aspect of your life, your social life, your political thought, your activities at school, your activities on the street. They are telling us if we dare even think to resist, we are going to be clamped down on. You grow up in Palestine and you hear about the Nakba, which is the mass displacement of the Palestinian people at the hands of Zionist militias that would later form today’s Israeli military.
.
00:01:41:03 – 00:02:03:19
But the Nakba is not in the past tense. It’s not a tragedy that once passed that we commemorate today, but it is in fact ongoing. For 75 years, the Israeli government has worked to ensure we no longer exist. The homes they demolished, the villages, the depopulated children they killed and in prison is the evidence of this. The material evidence is on our bodies.
00:02:03:24 – 00:02:28:12
I know this first hand because when I was 11 years old, a settler organization backed by the Israeli military broke into our house. One of a few organizations that are registered as charities, either in the UK or in the United States that collaborate with the Israeli government to take over Palestinian houses of all over occupied Palestine. In 2009, I was coming home from school to find all of our furniture scattered across the length of the street.
00:02:28:13 – 00:02:32:09
I saw that my grandmother had been hospitalized. This is my grandmother
00:02:41:22 – 00:02:43:23
There were dozens and dozens of soldiers
00:02:46:18 – 00:02:49:07
and that the settlers had taken over half of our house.
00:02:52:16 – 00:02:57:16
Ten years later, they came back to take over the rest of our house and the rest of our neighborhood.
00:02:57:18 – 00:03:28:03
Yaacoub, you know, this is not your house. Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back. So what’s the problem? What are you yelling at me? I didn’t do this. You are stealing my house. And if I don’t steal it, someone else is going to steal it. It’s quite an absurd situation to find yourself in American or British nationals who are often fleeing fraud charges or sexual abuse charges, who come to occupy Jerusalem, to squat in our houses as if they are theirs by divine decree, as if God is some kind of real estate agent.
00:03:28:08 – 00:03:57:13
There’s only one sovereign body here. There’s only one people that have a connection to his land. There is no such thing as a Palestinian people, no such thing as a Palestinian state. And there’s no such thing as any sovereignty by anyone except the Jewish people here. Living on the brink of displacement almost distorts your sense of time, your entire perception of the world and your reality becomes wrapped up in these court hearings and in these settler campaigns and these harassments and these police raids.
00:03:57:13 – 00:04:20:18
And it’s not just the psychological and emotional damage. It’s the financial damages. It’s the loss of time, living your entire life without having any agency, almost my whole childhood revolved around going to the court hearings and having my father come back from the court hearings and thinking when they would finally come and take over the House, and if we were able to buy ourselves some more time, you never know if that day would be the last night
00:04:20:19 – 00:04:42:05
you ever sleep in your bed. I remember we would go to the court hearings and as the lawyers and judges deliberated, we would whispering each other’s ears, shards of what we thought they said. It’s almost like being a zebra at the mercy of a jury of hyenas. My grandmother used to say, If the judge is your enemy, to whom do you complain?
00:04:42:06 – 00:05:07:14
The judge himself is a settler and the court is a settler court built on top of Palestinian land. And the laws are settler laws that were enacted to facilitate and bureaucratize and legalize the process of your own ethnic cleansing. The fact that there are Palestinians who can smell the humidity of the sea from their kitchen windows that can never go to the sea because there are dozens of checkpoints that separate them from it is violence.
00:05:07:14 – 00:05:33:02
The fact that there are Palestinian kids in Lebanon and refugee camps who listen to their grandparents detail their past lives in Jaffa, and Yaffa, in Haifa, in Nazareth, who look at those photographs and yearn to visit but can never visit is within itself violence. There are 5.3 million Palestinian refugees in refugee camps today who longed to return to their homeland, and their exile is within itself violence.
00:05:33:04 – 00:05:56:08
Our ability to remain steadfast on our land is a form of resistance. The fact that we get sent dozens and dozens of settlers who get salaries to sit in our front yards, to terrorize us, to make our lives a living hell. The fact that we have to deal with police brutality at all times, the fact that we have to deal with a myriad of laws and laws that are there to displace us, to ethnically cleanse us, to erase us, to silence us, to put us in jail.
00:05:56:10 – 00:06:14:21
And yet we are able to continue, is amazing. People like the word resilience, but I think we’re very stubborn and our ability to be steadfast and to stay where we are and our ability to cope and deal with the horrors that none of these Americans or British nationals that spend their lives defending would tolerate living under for one second.
00:06:14:22 – 00:06:36:07
All of these defenders of apartheid, all these defenders of Israeli settler colonialism, if they had to come and live in our reality for one split second, they would not bear it. British politicians, American politicians, German politicians, they are not mere supporters of Israeli colonialism in Palestine, they are partners. Of course, they are not going to talk about Palestinians right to self-determination the same way
00:06:36:07 – 00:07:08:10
They are not going to talk about Palestinians’ right to resist or Palestinians right to defend themselves. It’s the same reason why they see no issue in talking about nuclear states’ right to defend themselves from an unarmed population, as though that makes any sense. It is absurd that the world today has been duped to believe that one of the most lethal armies in the world, one of the most highly funded armies in the world, a nuclear state, is somehow defending itself against a population of refugees that are kept in an open air prison.
00:07:08:10 – 00:07:32:12
They are kept surrounded by a nine meter high concrete wall that swallows their land and tears their families apart. People hear the word colonialism and they think of something that is long gone in the past, and they don’t realize that it exists in the present tense, in my front yard, in my neighborhood, on my street. There are Palestinian villages that today are being uprooted to be replaced by settler towns.
00:07:32:13 – 00:07:55:11
There are Palestinian roads and cemeteries that are being desecrated to be replaced by military outposts and police departments. Colonialism is not something that the world has rid itself of. It is alive and well and eating at the land in Palestine. When we think of colonialism, all of us have a moral clarity. We know that it’s bad, we outright reject it.
00:07:55:15 – 00:08:26:09
And yet when we look at colonialism in Palestine today, this is a complicated issue, this is a nuanced issue, this is a touchy topic, it’s a sensitive topic. We’re not allowed to talk about it because it might ruin my career prospects, but need i remind you, across history opposition to atrocities has not been met with applause. People who opposed injustices, who opposed colonialism, who opposed slavery were not met with congratulations and red carpets and applause and awards.
In fact, they were targeted and attacked and censored and smeared and persecuted. It is not easy to be on the right side of history. It takes courage. Ignorance is not the problem. It is inaction. Everything I’ve said here today has been said by hundreds, if not thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before me. And it is about time that something is done about the 75 years of Israeli settler colonialism in our lands.
00:08:53:07 – 00:09:15:18
It is about time that we move on from trying to debate something so clearly indefensible and try to create some justice for the Palestinians that are living today. It has gone on for too long and we deserve this justice within our lifetime. It’s easy to look at people like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, and think of them as courageous icons who must be respected.
00:09:15:20 – 00:09:33:15
What is difficult is looking at an injustice as it happens in real time and deciding that you want to take a moral stance, that you want to be on the right side of history. Those of you watching this today have a chance to be on the right side of history. But the question is, are you going to take it?
00:09:33:15 – 00:09:56:06
It’s time for us to center Palestinian voices instead of completely coddling and uplifting the voices of Israeli politicians. Palestinians who live under occupation day in and day out have all of the analysis and the insight necessary. It’s time for journalists to start doing their jobs by centering Palestinian voices instead of being stenographers and state secretaries for the Israeli regime.
