al-jazeera | “If I don’t steal your home, someone else will steal it,” was the answer given by an Israeli settler to Mona al-Kurd, a young Palestinian woman who accused him of stealing her home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in the occupied East Jerusalem.
The dialogue, captured on video by Palestinian activist Tamer Maqalda on Saturday, shows 22-year-old al-Kurd confronting the settler in the garden of her family home.
In the video, al-Kurd is heard telling the settler in English: “Jacob, you know that this is not your home.”
The settler replies in a thick US accent: “Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back, so what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me?”
The response provoked al-Kurd, who told him “You are stealing my house!”
“If I don’t steal it, someone else will steal it,” Jacob answers. “So why are you yelling at me?”
“No one is allowed to steal my home!” al-Kurd shouts.
Jacob then says in Hebrew: “This is not mine in order to return it.”
My baby cousin entered the Israeli army today 😠pic.twitter.com/yDtMtbjPQ6
— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) October 26, 2016
In recent months, the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood saw a series of sit-ins by Palestinians to protest against Israeli orders for them to vacate their homes, which they have described as a continuation of the ethnic cleansing that began with the Nakba in 1948.
On Monday night, dozens of Israeli forces stormed the neighbourhood and assaulted Palestinian families by beating and shooting tear gas and sound bombs at them. According to local Palestinian media, 20 people were injured, and at least four Palestinian men and one girl were arrested, with two being released on Tuesday.
Half of the al-Kurd family home was taken over by Israeli settlers in 2009. Al-Kurd’s twin brother Mohammed previously told Al Jazeera that sharing their home with “squatters with Brooklyn accents” was “insufferable, intolerable [and] terrible”.
“They are just sitting in our home, tormenting us, harassing us, doing everything they can to not only force us to leave the second half of our home but also harassing our neighbours into leaving their homes as part of an effort to completely annihilate the presence of Palestinians from Jerusalem,” Mohammed said, who was 11 years old when the settlers forced their way in.
Last March, the Israeli district court in occupied East Jerusalem ratified orders for six Palestinian families – the al-Kurds included – in Sheikh Jarrah to vacate their homes in order to make way for the settlers. The same court also ruled that another seven families should leave their homes by August 1.
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