“Jews will not replace us.”
You may remember this chant from the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. It relies on a racist conspiracy theory called the Great Replacement, which accuses Jewish people in positions of power of using non-white immigration to bring about a genocide of white people. That’s antisemitism, and it’s repugnant.
Now consider the case of Mohammed El-Kurd, one of the two writers at the centre of the storm over Adelaide Writers’ Week.
Kurd’s family live in a house in the occupied East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah. Some years ago the family decided to build an extension to their house. Permits to extend or renovate homes Palestinians live in are rarely if ever granted. They proceeded.
After Jerusalem’s Israeli municipality confiscated the keys to the extension, they somehow ended up in the hands of a group of Jewish settlers, who moved in. This happened when Mohammed El-Kurd was a child. You can watch a video he made in 2011, when he was 12, of what this was like. He is now a grown man, and settlers are still “sharing” his home, their residency underpinned by the guns of a state of which the settlers are citizens and the Kurd family are not.
After living under a multi-generational military occupation, it’s not surprising he is lashing out on Twitter.
Read the article by Maher Mughrabi in The Sydney Morning Herald.