Documentary about east Jerusalem boy wins prize

A documentary film about a Palestinian boy from east Jerusalem who learns to live with the tensions precipitated by the loss of his home to Jews who settle in his neighborhood has won a prestigious broadcast prize.

The film “Sheikh Jarrah, My Neighborhood” won a Peabody Award in the documentary category, the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, which presents the award, announced on Wednesday.

The film, produced by the Qatar-based news agency Al-Jazeera, documented two years in the life of Mohammad al-Kurd, a Palestinian teenager whose family was forced to leave its home following the arrival of Jewish tenants in 2008. Although he is enraged at first, al-Kurd eventually joins the non-violent struggle waged by his family and other activists, some of them Israeli, as they campaign to regain the home.

Properties in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood have been hotly contested by Jews and Arabs in Israeli courts.

Jewish claims to the homes stem from pre-state documents that record Jewish ownership of several buildings and land in the neighborhood before 1948, when the area came under Jordanian rule.

The neighborhood then changed hands again in 1967, when Israel gained control of east Jerusalem and the West Bank in the Six-Day War.

For over a decade, Jewish groups have been waging a legal battle to oust Arab families from buildings and land that were once owned by Jews.