All right, joining me today is Mohammed El-Kurd.

He is an award-winning Palestinian journalist and writer.

He's an editor at large at Mondawice and the first Palestine correspondent at The Nation

Magazine.

His most recent book, Perfect Victims, and the Politics of Appeal is out now,

and he brought me my very own copy. Muhammad, you were born and grew up in Shekjara, East Jerusalem.

When you were 11 years old, half of your home was taken over under an Israeli court order.

What happened? Like, did you have to share your house?

Yeah, I mean, share is kind of an amicable word.

It was, you know, we were forced to live in half of our home.

The other half was taken by settlers. But to kind of paint an image, I want to say as absurd as it sounds, this is a reality that

many, many, many thousands of Palestinians live with.

Our house and our neighborhood received so much media attention because we live in such a

central neighborhood that was surrounded by all these international embassies

and consulates. So all these diplomats would watch us be constantly brutalized and terrorized

by the Israeli military from their balconies. So our house and our neighborhood became the center

of attention. But what happened was all of our families, in our neighborhood, it's 28 families.

They were all dispossessed, forcibly expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba. And then they were given these houses by the United

Nations. And in the 70s, there were settler organizations, Jewish American charities, actually

registered here as charities, who have sued us claiming our houses are their own with falsified document by divine decree saying

that God hang on I have to ask some questions yes yes please so your family owned a home yes and then a

court an Israeli court said you don't own this house anymore yes in the 70s and we in the 70s and then

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