Mohammed al-Kurd and his twin sister Muna have received a good deal of publicity during this past year for their “activism” in east Jerusalem, where their family lives in one of the contested properties in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The twins have helped manage to convince many in the world media that what is nothing more than dispute over the non-payment of rent by Arab tenants to Jewish owners of land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood is something far more ominous – a deliberate attempt by wily Zionists to “Judaize” eastern Jerusalem. The Al-Kurd family lives on land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, one of several Arab families who are living on land that has been owned by Jews since 1875. For a long time, these families have refused to pay rent, even though most of the Arabs involved have recognized that the claim of Jewish ownership of the land in question is valid. The only thing that matters to the El-Kurds is to squeeze whatever propaganda value they can out of the landlord-tenant dispute by claiming that Jews are trying illegally to expel Arabs from land they have a right to be on (In order to continue to “Judaize” east Jerusalem. If Israel is trying to “Judaize” east Jerusalem, it is doing a very poor job of it. In 1967, when Israel took possession of that part of the city, there were 66,000 Arabs in east Jerusalem; now there are 360,000.
More on Mohammed El-Kurd’s appointment by The Nation as their “Palestine” correspondent and on the so-called “Sheikh Jarrah evictions” can be found here. The El-Kurd twins — their being twins is apparently part of their charm — have complained about the “forced removal” of Palestinians from those disputed properties in Sheikh Jarrah, but there has been no such “forced removal.” No one has yet been evicted, despite all the sound and fury about “evictions.” Instead, there has been an excruciatingly slow process, as the property dispute has wound its way through the Israeli courts. All of the decisions have upheld the rights of the Jewish property owners. Now the case, on appeal, is to be decided by Israel’s Supreme Court, but given the riots in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood this past summer, the date for the Supreme Court to deliver its decision has been postponed.
Here are the facts about this property dispute that Mohammed El-Kurd would not like you to know about: In 1875, the Chief Rabbis of Jerusalem, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi, bought the Sheikh Jarrah properties from Arab owners. Then until 1948, Jews lived on the land, that was indisputably owned at the time by two Jewish organizations. In 1948, Jordan’s Arab Legion captured east Jerusalem and expelled all the Jews, including those living in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of east Jerusalem. In 1956, 28 Arab families moved onto the plots in Sheikh Jarrah; UNRWA built homes for them. In 1967, the Israelis captured east Jerusalem. But Israel did not, as it might have, simply expel the Arabs and move Jews back onto the land to which Jewish organizations had clear title, but that had been seized by Jordan in 1948 and kept until 1967. Instead, after 1967 the Arabs continued to live in their homes in Sheikh Jarrah, refusing to pay rent and claiming “to own” the properties in question.
Here’s a summary of the legal status both of the disputed properties in Sheikh Jarrah, and of those residing in them over time.
Legal status of the property:
- According to the Supreme Court, the land in question “was owned by Chief Rabbi (Hacham Bashi) Avraham Ashkenazi and Chief Rabbi Meir Orbach until the War of Independence [1948], after they purchased it in 1875 from its Arab owners.”
- Subsequently, two Jewish organizations, Va’ad Eidat HaSfaradim and Va’ad HaKlali L’Knesset Yisrael, worked to register the land with British Mandatory government in 1946. (It’s unclear why that attempt to register was made in 1946, if the land continued to be owned by the Grand Rabbis until 1948.)
- The properties were registered with Israeli authorities under these two organizations in 1973.
- These organizations sold the properties to the Nahalat Shimon organization in 2003.
Status of the residents:
According to a 1989 High Court decision, and reaffirmed repeatedly in subsequent cases, as in the case of any tenant living on someone else’s property, residents living on the land owned by these organizations were required to pay rent to the organizations that owned the properties. Their failure to do so, along with instances of illegal building and illegally renting properties to others, resulted in the current legal proceedings against them, culminating in the District Court decision.
Crucially, in 1982, a number of residents — including those whose descendants appealed to the District Court — agreed in Magistrate Court that the two Israeli non-profits were the legal land owners.
How did the District Court address the current residents’ claims of ownership?
The District Court case addressed the ownership claims of the eight appellants. The court found that:
- Three of the appellants are the children and grandchildren of residents who acknowledged the ownership of the Israeli organizations in court proceedings in 1982.
- Four of the appellants claim to have purchased the properties in 1991 — 19 years after the properties were registered under the Israeli groups — from a man named “Ismail.” The court notes that the appellants never identified “Ismail,” nor did they prove that they had indeed purchased the properties from this person.
- One appellant represents the estate of a deceased former resident. In 2009, the Court determined that she had not paid rent as required, had built illegally on the property, and therefore could be evicted.
Previous court decisions on the ownership of the property:
In October 2020, the Magistrate Court rejected the residents’ claim that the property had been promised to them by the Jordanian authorities, during the years in which Jordan controlled the area. According to that decision, “all of the witnesses were born after 1967 or were very young at the time and testified that they heard about the [Jordanian] promise from an older relative.”
They claimed to have “heard” about the Jordanian promise from older relatives, but had nothing in writing to back up this flimsiest of claims.
The court added that “the only document presented” to prove this alleged Jordanian guarantee “is a copy of a standard document from the Jordanian equivalent of the Housing Ministry, but this form is un-signed and does not bestow ownership on any of the defendants.”
These appellants had nothing to offer but an off-the-rack standard document, unsigned, one of those that anyone could pick up at a counter at Jordan’s Housing Ministry. Without a signature, it has no legal significance whatsoever.
Similarly, earlier Supreme Court decisions rejected ownership claims of Sheikh Jarrah residents based on what the court found to be an apparently altered Turkish deed and an “inauthentic” contract.
Moreover, in 2020, the Magistrate Court noted, “throughout all of the deliberations, the defendants claimed through their counsel that they were not tenants but rather held the property right. Apparently, as they realized that they had not convinced the Court that they were the owners of the property, the defendants then changed their story and claimed for the first time that they were tenants who should not be removed from their homes.”
The record above of the legal dispute is quite something: the forgeries (altered Turkish deeds), the “ownership deed” presented by the Arab appellants that turned out to be an unsigned standard document readily available at Jordan’s Housing Ministry, of no legal validity; the claims – without any documents to back them up – that a mysterious man named “Ismail” had sold some of the Arabs their properties; the three Arab appellants who in 1982 changed their stories and admitted they did not own the land on which they were living; the four Arab appellants who in 2020 did the same thing, and dropped their claim of ownership, that they had maintained for so long, and realizing that they had no case, now claimed to be “tenants who should not be removed from their homes.” No written evidence has been presented, at any time, by any of the Arab appellants, other than one forged Turkish document, to support their claim.
By mid-May, the Arabs were rioting in Jerusalem because of their whipped-up fanatical frenzy over the so-called “eviction of Arabs from Sheikh Jarrah” — and among those doing the whipping-up of that fury were Mohammed and Muna El-Kurd. They ignored all the evidence of Jewish ownership, as well as the failure of the Arabs to produce any proof of ownership save for one Turkish document that turned out to be a forgery, and a copy of a standard printed form from the Jordanian equivalent of a housing ministry, which was unsigned, and therefore, legally worthless. was made. And some of the Arab plaintiffs had a dim memory of someone named “Ismail” who in 1981 had “sold” them their properties. But he gave them nothing on paper; they did not know his last name or anything more about him, and it is likely that “Ismail” was made up out of whole cloth.
Muhammed El-Kurd and his sister Muna have been in the forefront of the campaign to misrepresent the property dispute at Sheikh Jarrah as an effort by Israel to “Judaize” the neighborhood through a campaign of “illegal evictions.” But that’s not all Muhammed El-Kurd has made himself celebrated for, and caused him and his sister to be named two of the “100 Most Influential People” in the world by TIME. He’s full of anti-American rage, calling the US military a “murderous terrorist organization” and US President Joe Biden a “successful was criminal.” In a separate tweet, Mohammed has expressed his hope that US troops’ “PTSD never heal.” His hatred of the U.S. is palpable. And now, as the correspondent on “Palestine” for the far-left, anti-Israel and anti-American publication, The Nation, Mohammed El-Kurd has found his dream job. He’s only 23. He has so many more years to report on the “illegal evictions” at Sheikh Jarrah, on the “Judaizing of Jerusalem,” on the “occupied” territories in “the West Bank,” and on what he incessantly calls “apartheid” in the “colonial settler state” of the Jews. The Nation must be very proud.