Mohammed el-Kurd
El-Kurd has referred to evictions as a form of ethnic cleansing,[1] and has also accused Israel of imposing apartheid-style laws and regulations onto Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Prior to the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, he was pursuing a master's degree in the United States, but returned to protest Israel's eviction of Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem (see Sheikh Jarrah controversy).
[5][6] El-Kurd was born into a family of Palestinian Muslims in the neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on 15 May 1998.
[5] Since his return to the Israeli-occupied West Bank amidst the Sheikh Jarrah controversy, El-Kurd has been documenting and speaking out against Palestinian displacement in East Jerusalem.
[9][10][11] He and his twin sister, Muna el-Kurd, began campaigning to raise global awareness on Israeli policies in East Jerusalem through various social media channels.
[22] His poetry and articles are in English, written on the themes of dispossession, ethnic cleansing, systemic and structural violence, settler colonialism, Islamophobia, and gender roles.
[23] El-Kurd blames the "Zionist project" – and multinational political, diplomatic, and economic support for it – for the displacement, subjugation, and statelessness of the Palestinian people,[23] sometimes mentioning the Palestinians displaced from their homes during the Nakba that started in December 1947, a count he places at 750,000, stating that Zionist militia massacred them and forcibly removed them.
[23] El-Kurd notes that occupation does not only mean that Palestinians carry a different-colored ID, that their freedom of movement is restricted, and that their land is constantly at risk of theft, but also that they "live a life that is devalued every few years", as he describes it.
[24] El-Kurd characterizes some tools of the Israeli state are techniques of colonization, such as isolating Palestinian villages by declaring the land around them to be national parks.
Breaking through and deciding to fight back he described, was a moment of understanding the psychological warfare as a turning point to the realization that he was worthy (of housing, in this case) at the most basic level.
[23] He describes a Palestinian realization of worth – despite burnout and exhaustion continuing to be realities – regarding the right to five things:[23] In 2021, El-Kurd stated that much of the Zionist project has involved:[23] He concluded that the collective protests against expulsion in his home neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, showed unprecedented unity among the different groups overcoming the delusions that separation had created.
[23] El-Kurd challenges Western media that regularly ask Palestinian guests to denounce violent protests or attacks by Hamas and other groups, characterizing these questions as inciting, bigoted and disrespectful.
"[28] El-Kurd responded to criticism by clarifying he was referring to the 2009 Aftonbladet Israel controversy about Israeli doctors allegedly harvesting organs from Palestinian corpses without the permission of their families.
I don’t want to waste more time on this matter, because we all should be focusing on the horrors in GazaHe further stated that he was "obviously not an idiot" and "would never" call for violence.
