October 14, 2021 12:13 pm
“Hey Yacub, you know this is not your house”. Thus began the fame of Muna and Mohammed el Kurd on social networks. In the video posted on Instagram, the young Muna can be seen speaking in English to Yacub, a Jew from Long Island, in the United States, who has occupied part of the El Kurd family home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem for ten years.
“Hey Yacub, you know this is not your home, that you are stealing our home.”
He replies: “If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it”.
The sun is shining, a cat is playing in the meadow. There are no weapons or stones. But from this video a new digital intifada has started which aims to change the narrative about the rapid and inexorable illegal colonization of the Palestinian territories.
The hashtag #SaveSheikhJarrah, named after the Palestinian neighborhood where twelve families are threatened with deportation, has gone viral. And it reveals the fact that this is not a simple struggle between neighbors, but a precise plan of ethnic substitution in East Jerusalem.
The twins of the El Kurd family, Muna and Mohammed, are 23 years old. Their very existence belies the terrible words of David Ben Gurion, the first person to hold the post of Israeli prime minister, who declared: “The old will die, the young will forget.” Muna and Mohammed el Kurd have not forgotten. On the contrary, they help re-emerge in the eyes of the world the non-violent and incredibly resilient spirit of resistance of the Palestinians.
In the spotlight
From childhood they began to contest the narrative on the Palestinian question and since they were eleven the twins have been in the spotlight of the international media.
The documentary Homefront follows Mohammed at eleven. A group of Israeli settlers is seen violently breaking into the El Kurd house on November 3, 2008. The house built by Mohammed and Muna’s father to accommodate the large family has not obtained the authorization of the Israeli state. The Israeli court then makes it available to settlers from the United States through private organizations that support them financially.
Palestinians born in East Jerusalem must apply for a residence permit as if they were foreigners
The young Mohammed asks: “How is it possible that we do not have the right to live there without permission, while the settlers, who do not have permission, can?”.
Palestinians born in East Jerusalem must apply for a residence permit as if they were foreigners, while settlers who have just arrived from the United States have the immediate right to residency. This inequality enshrined in law, and formulated on the basis of ethnic and religious origin, is one of the elements that the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem and the US NGO Human Rights Watch have found Israel guilty of the crime of apartheid. .
In 2009 Mohammed el Kurd also met with Israeli organizations that came to support the inhabitants of Sheikh Jarrah: “At the moment I asked myself: are they Jews and do they come to support us? And then I understood the differences between right and left ”.
He then decided to become a human rights lawyer.
Close eyes
British The Guardian filmed the twins a year later, they are twelve in the documentary Sharing our house with Israeli settlers in Sheikh Jarrah (Sharing our home with Israeli settlers in Sheikh Jarrah). The children are insulted by groups of Israeli tourists who have arrived by bus to see “the most problematic house”, an American yells at them “you are murderers”. They go to the playground where the settlers tell them “we will throw you all out of your neighborhood”. Children are clearly afraid but already show a particular resilience for their young age.
At 23, however, Mohammed no longer wants to become a lawyer. He is tired of the legal vocabulary he hears from childhood – “illegal settlements”, “occupied territories” – used as a mantra by an international community that closes its eyes and silences the conscience immediately after uttering those words. Expressions that indicate a temporary situation that has lasted for 54 years.
In May 2021 the Damascus gate – a meeting place for Palestinians in Jerusalem during the holy month of Ramadan – was closed by Israeli forces, which also carried out a raid on the Al Aqsa mosque, causing 186 injuries. There are riots in many Palestinian and Israeli cities. Sheikh Jarrah is once again at the center of the struggle for a Jerusalem that is not only Jewish. Yet another war begins in the Gaza Strip.
Interviewed by CNN, Mohammed el Kurd responds with imperturbability and a new vocabulary that wants to describe his reality without lies and without having to apologize.
The CNN journalist asks: “Do you support the violent protests that have broken out in solidarity with you and other families in your situation?”.
Mohammed replies: “Do you support the violent expropriation involving me and my family?”.
Silence from the reporter.
This CNN video also goes viral and the El Kurd family home in Sheikh Jarrah returns to the center of the struggle to change the narrative.
A book for the grandmother
Muna is arrested. Mohammed also. Once released, they continue to publish and tell reality in new words on social networks. Muna’s account has 1.6 million followers. He makes an impeccable, reasoned, informative use of it. He wants to become a journalist and he already has all the characteristics.
Mohammed went to study in the United States, he has just published a poetry book dedicated to Rifqa, his grandmother who died at 103: “She was older than the state of Israel”.
With a dry and effective language, he touches – as the great Palestinian poets did in the past, first of all Mahmoud Darwish – the theme of the individual and that of the struggle for freedom.
The book came out in English on October 12 and is already at the top of pre-sales on Amazon Middle East. Mohammed el Kurd also described Sheikh Jarrah’s situation in a long piece published on the Egyptian website Mada Masr, If they steal Sheikh Jarrah (If they steal Sheikh Jarrah), in several reports for the Guardian, and was recently hired by the US newspaper The Nation as a correspondent from Palestine. He took full possession of his narrative.
The twins have been included by Time magazine among the hundred most influential people of 2021. They continue to change words and are very followed on social networks by all Palestinians, from the Occupied Territories and the diaspora, united by the need to change the way of being introduce yourself. They are tired of having to answer offensive and ignorant questions like: “Do you hate Jews? Do you support the terrorists? “.
Part of a generation that is not very politicized in traditional terms, they are attentive to narration and identity and continue their struggle on social networks, around the hashtag of #SaveSheikhjarrah. Their mobilization has a lot in common with the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States: it is based on the production of a new story that starts with those who are oppressed, without apologizing for being the victim.
At the Internazionale festival in Ferrara, on October 3 Mohammed el Kurd seduced the public of the Municipal Theater with his words, those of his music, his poems and his political outlook.
Serious and uncompromising in the fight, when he laughs he offers a sunny and sweet smile. He would like to be a furniture designer. Remember that you shouldn’t be so serious at 23, but live a much more carefree life than hers. Maybe like that of his peers a few kilometers from Sheikh Jarrah.
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