Mohmmed El Kurd delivered a powerful speech at the United Nations on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.
Full transcript in comments:
Um, hello, international community. Thank you for these groundbreaking speeches. I'm sure the occupation authorities are really concerned right now.
My name is Mohammed El Kurd, I am here to deliver a speech. When I was 11, I came home from school and saw my furniture scattered across my street in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood in occupied Jerusalem, occupied Palestine, the street overflowed with soldiers, police and settlers.
My neighbors were screaming and protesting. Some of them hospitalized. Settlers had invaded our home and taken over half of it. They said it was there by divine decree as if God is a real estate agent. Now, more than a decade later, they're coming to finish what they started. Billionaire backed settler organizations protected by the Israeli occupation forces will likely throw out my family from our home forever, not only my family, but hundreds, if not thousands of Palestinians in my neighborhood and other communities like Silwan and Isawiya and Masafer Yatta in the south Hebron Hills and elsewhere. This fate of dispossession looms over much of my neighborhood. Our lives are consumed by the anxiety of living on the brink of homelessness.
The UN has called this a war crime, but more importantly, I know that this is theft. My community, like all Palestinian communities is no stranger to dispossession. My grandmother was expelled from her home in Haifa in 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were displaced in the Nakba. She found refuge in the fifties after the United Nations, [you all] and Jordan built a housing project in Sheikh Jarrah promising that the 28 refugee families would receive legal title to their properties. Then the 1967 war happened.
After Israeli forces illegally annexed Jerusalem, several settler organizations, some of which are headquartered in the United States, have relentlessly attempted to take over the neighborhood. We obviously tried to fight this forced expulsion in court, but as my grandmother used to say, "if the judge is your enemy, to whom do you complain?".
Israeli land grabbing has been rubber-coated with legislation, making it almost impossible to challenge. Even so, the battle over Sheikh Jarrah is not legal in its essence. It is political. It is part of the larger systematic effort Israelise the entirety of Jerusalem, my native city. My family and our neighbors understand this, we know firsthand that the Israeli judicial system is created by, and for those who benefit endlessly from the Israeli settler colonial regime.
As I speak to you, our family lawyer is attempting to persuade a settler judge to rule against settlements. The word apartheid comes to mind, but saying there's asymmetry and injustice in the Israeli judicial system is a gross understatement.
What we have on our hands is a colonialist ideologically driven system built by and for colonizers working exactly as it was intended to. These unjust laws are not preferential, serving the demographic and political goals of the Zionist project. They are concealed behind a cloak of quasi democratic seemingly disputable legislation.
This summer, we took our struggle to the streets, our efforts to resist the state over were joined by Palestinians, across Jerusalem, and the world, in what became known as the unity uprising. The situation rapidly escalated into attacks on beseiged Gaza.
Palestinians mobilized and resisted, and around and around the world people demonstrated in support of the Palestinian right to liberation and decolonization. But months later, the world's attention has moved away. The reality for Palestinians, however, has not changed. Our neighborhood was put under a blockade for three months, maintained by Israeli forces with continuing restrictions intended to suffocate the lives of the hundreds of Palestinians who live there.
And yet, meanwhile, armed Jewish settlers who have already occupied some of our hom