Berber Verpoest’s film Home is a Headline (2017), produced in cooperation with PalVision and Danish Church Aid with funding support from the European Union, offers an intimate portrait of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem. Released through Journeyman Pictures in 2021, the film follows residents of Sheikh Jarrah, Silwan, al-‘Issawiya, and other Palestinian neighborhoods there, focusing on housing insecurity, demolition threats, and the struggle to build a future in a city designed to constrain Palestinian growth.
At the center of the film is Muna El-Kurd, years before she became internationally known during the 2021 Sheikh Jarrah protests (see Muna El-Kurd). We meet her, not as a global symbol, but as a young Jerusalemite trying to carve out a future for herself while living inside a home that settlers partially seized in 2009. Her dream of becoming a journalist runs throughout the film, not as a personal ambition detached from politics, but as a response to the reality around her. For Muna, studying media becomes a way to tell the story of her family, her neighborhood, and a city where displacement is not a one-time event but an ongoing condition.
What makes the film powerful is that it does not rely on abstract political arguments. Instead, it builds its case through everyday life. A young woman studies on a couch, because she has no room of her own. A father wakes up terrified by the sound of construction equipment, fearing his home is about to be demolished. Residents explain how obtaining building permits is nearly impossible, while urban planners describe how Palestinian neighborhoods are hemmed in by settlements, national parks, zoning restrictions, and chronic underinvestment. The result is a city where normal urban development becomes nearly unattainable.
One of the film’s strongest themes is the paradox at the heart of Jerusalem’s planning regime. Residents repeatedly explain that they are denied permits to build on their own land. Faced with overcrowding and population growth, many families build without permits, because there is simply no alternative. Yet the same act of building to house one’s family exposes them to fines, demolition orders, and years of legal uncertainty. The film argues that this is not a bureaucratic failure but rather a system that produces insecurity by design. Families are trapped between the impossibility of obtaining permission and the punishment that follows building without it.
Watching the film today is striking, because it captures a moment that now feels almost calm compared to what followed. In 2017, the residents who were interviewed described fears of expulsion demolition, and displacement. By 2021, Sheikh Jarrah had become a global symbol of Palestinian resistance after planned expulsions of several Palestinian families triggered widespread protests and international attention. The neighborhood's story moved from local headlines to international news, but the underlying issues remained largely unchanged.
Yet the story did not end in 2021. If anything, the pressures documented in Home is a Headline have evolved and sharpened considerably. The threat facing Sheikh Jarrah today extends well beyond the individual expulsion cases that brought international attention to the neighborhood in 2021. In late 2024, the Jerusalem Development Authority submitted a zoning plan (TPS 1237767) that would demolish roughly 40 Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah’s Umm Haroun area and replace them with 316 housing units for Jewish residents—none allocated to Palestinians—including two high-rise towers, with one reaching 30 stories (see Israel Aiming to Supplant Umm Haroun Area of Sheikh Jarrah with Settler Skyscrapers and Amid Gaza Genocide, Israel Hones in on Sheikh Jarrah). The plan, advanced through the Jerusalem Municipality in May 2025, would displace around 45 Palestinian families, many of whom have lived there since the 1960s under protected-tenancy status inherited from Jordanian-era leases. According to the Israeli rights group Ir Amim, this marks the first time urban renewal mechanisms have been used to strip Palestinians of protected tenancy and demolish an entire residential section of East Jerusalem, not through individual expulsion lawsuits, but through a single municipal planning decision. No alternative housing has been offered to the affected families.
This development makes the film feel remarkably prescient. What appeared in the documentary as individual stories of overcrowding, permit denials, and legal battles can now be understood as part of a much broader process, one that has moved from contesting individual homes to erasing an entire neighborhood section at once. The fears expressed by residents years ago—that they could lose their homes, their neighborhoods, and eventually their place in Jerusalem itself—have not faded. They have, if anything, been formalized into municipal planning documents.
The film also presents different Palestinian responses to life under Israeli occupation. Most of the people featured insist on remaining in Jerusalem despite the hardships. Some speak about resistance explicitly; others simply continue building, studying, working, and raising families. Staying itself becomes a form of resistance. Yet the film includes another perspective through a young Palestinian student who contemplates leaving Jerusalem for the city of Jaffa. He questions whether enduring suffering should always be celebrated and admits that he wants a life where he can develop his potential without constant pressure. His departure is not portrayed as a betrayal but as another consequence of the conditions imposed on Palestinians in Jerusalem, and an objective of the Israeli occupation, to make life unlivable, so that leaving is the only option for those who can afford it, but what is the cost?
This tension remains highly relevant today. Families in Sheikh Jarrah continue to face legal battles, ownership disputes, and the prospect of expulsion, while the Umm Haroun plan represents a structural escalation, a shift from picking off individual households through the courts to redesigning the demographic map of an entire section of the neighborhood through planning law.
Home is a Headline feels less like a documentary about a particular moment and more like a warning. The conditions documented in the film, housing shortages, permit denials, demolition fears, overcrowding, and displacement, have been visible years before Sheikh Jarrah became a global headline. What the film reveals is that the events of 2009, 2017, or 2021 were not an exception. They were, as clearly observed, the continuation of a longer process that residents have been describing for years, one that is now entering a new and more sweeping phase.
Perhaps the most important contribution of the film is its insistence on treating Palestinians not only as victims of policy but as people with ambitions, doubts, relationships, and futures they are trying to build. Muna wants to become a journalist. A father wants a better life for his children. A student wants the freedom to pursue his dreams. These are ordinary aspirations, yet in Jerusalem they become political. The film reminds us that the struggle over land, housing, and planning is ultimately a struggle over something much more basic: the right to imagine a future in one’s own city.