Oscars documentary winner portrays one side of the Israel-Palestinian conflict - Washington Examiner
This year’s Academy Award for best documentary feature film went to No Other Land, in which a team of Israeli and Palestinian documentarians present a heart-tugging but alarmingly one-sided view of Palestinian villagers’ struggle against Israeli law.
At every turn, No Other Land provides an anti-Israel view of self-described activists’ efforts to maintain their homes in Masafer Yatta, a village in Area C of the West Bank, which remains under Israeli control following the 1995 Oslo II Accords. The village is located in a designated Israeli military zone. Despite stop work orders, an Israeli High Court of Justice decision that threatens displacement and outright demolition of homes, No Other Land shows how local residents continue to rebuild in Masafer Yatta.
Recommended Stories
- Did Democrats wear pink to honor boys playing girls sports?
- Trump's speech strategy: The good, the bad, and the good again
- Trump brings back sanity, rebukes the LGBT lobby
Near the beginning of his film, Palestinian documentarian Basel Adra shows viewers idyllic footage from his childhood in the village, where his family herd sheep and his father owns a gas pump. The screen switches to a view of Israeli bulldozers demolishing a home in Masafer Yatta, with its occupants looking on in horror before moving all of their household belongings, including a refrigerator, into a nearby cave.
“Our ancestors settled here in the 1830s,” one man tells Adra’s camera. “They made us strangers in our land.”
The reality is different, according to Joel Margolis, who wrote for the Jewish News Syndicate that Masafer Yatta was a “barren expanse” of land that was designated as an Israeli firing zone in the 1980s. Margolis said Palestinians began a hasty effort to build up homes in the region in 1999, “violat[ing] the Oslo Accords by failing to obtain building permits from Israel’s Civil Administration.”
Naomi Linder Kahn concurred in the Jerusalem Post, noting that the area was designated mawat, or “dead,” in the Ottoman era because the desert land had no access to water. Though local shepherds who grazed their sheep in the region sometimes bedded down in nearby caves, Kahn said the Israeli High Court of Justice decision that allows Israel to demolish homes on the land contains examples proving “unequivocally that the residents of the illegal ‘villages’ of Masafer Yatta arrived after the IDF closed off the area for military use.”
While No Other Land spotlights a rugged and seemingly self-sufficient population, Kahn said structures in Masafer Yatta were funded by the Palestinian Authority, with “foreign interests jump[ing] right in after them, funding infrastructure projects to support the ‘indigenous farmers.’”
An International Peace and Cooperation Center report from 2016 notes that UN-Habitat, the Palestinian Ministry of Local Government, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rabbis for Human Rights, Action Against Hunger, Norwegian Refugee Council, Al Quds Center, Al Haq Association, St. Eve Association, and Comet ME are among the donors assisting with growth inside Masafer Yatta.
The documentary leans heavily into the differences between Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. Unlike Adra, Abraham is able to travel into and out of the West Bank to document the destruction of homes for the Israeli press.
In a moving clip, Adra talks about the cars with yellow Israeli plates that “can move freely in the land” and the cars with green Palestinian plates that “can’t leave the West Bank.”
“Israel controls both colors,” Adra says. “An entire world built on a division. Green man. Yellow man.”
In the latter portions of No Other Land, Adra also includes brutal footage of settler violence in Masafer Yatta, including imagery of an Israeli settler murdering a village resident just days after the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Adra’s lens, however, only fixates on the violence and division in one segment of the conflict-racked region.
As Margolis explained, an “honest filmmaker would compare Area C with Area A,” where Israelis attempting to build homes “would probably not live long enough to enjoy the courtesy of a trial.”
Two Israeli men were murdered in Area A, under Palestinian control, in a single week in June 2024. This caused the Israeli police to remind Israeli citizens that “entry into Area A is prohibited by law and constitutes a real danger to life.”
Thus far, no U.S. distributor has picked up No Other Land. While the film is an artistically stunning reinterpretation of the David and Goliath story, its compelling retelling artfully hides the bias contained within.
In his Oscars acceptance speech, Adra accused Israel of ethnic cleansing. Abraham said. “There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy with national rights for both of our people,” and said U.S. foreign policy is “helping to block this path.” But for the “truly free and safe” future Abraham then called for, the world must take an even-handed view of a region rent by conflict. That view won’t be found in No Other Land.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and the host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into nearly two decades of war and the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.