On Sunday night, the movie “No Other Land” won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. A closer look reveals that this “documentary” is shameless propaganda put out by a blatantly antisemitic Hollywood.
The movie was directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor in their directorial debut and co-produced by Norway. The movie tells the story of a young Palestinian “activist” named Basel Adra, who has been resisting the forced displacement of his people by Israel’s military in Masafer Yatta near Hebron. He records the gradual destruction of his homeland, where Israeli soldiers are tearing down homes and evicting their inhabitants to enforce a court order maintaining that the area has been legally designated as a military firing zone. He befriends Yuval, a Jewish Israeli journalist who helps him struggle. They form an unexpected bond, but the gap between their living conditions challenges their friendship.
The film has won several awards as a documentary and was included on Screen International’s list of top documentaries of 2024. It was filmed over four years between 2019 and 2023, wrapping production days before Hamas launched its deadly Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel that started the war in Gaza. While the film does mention rising Israeli settler attacks on the villages since October 7, and the film’s directors have also used their festival run to speak out against Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza, it does not mention the massacre carried out by Hamas and Palestinian civilians.
The movie was also heavily criticized and has failed to find a US distributor. Israel’s culture minister Miki Zohar slammed the movie.
“The Oscar win for the film ‘No Other Country’ is a sad moment for the world of cinema – instead of presenting the complexity of our reality, the filmmakers chose to echo narratives that distort Israel’s image in the world,” Zohar wrote on X. “Freedom of expression is an important value, but turning the slander of Israel into a tool for international promotion is not creativity – it is sabotage of the State of Israel.”
Countless ironies, errors, and outright lies are connected with the film, beginning with its title. The title in English is “No Other Land,” but in Hebrew it is אין ארץ אחרת (Ein Eretz Acheret). This is an apparent reference to a popular 1986 Israeli song called אין לי ארץ אחרת (Ein Li Eretz Acheret), written by Ehud Manor as a late response to his younger brother being killed in the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition in 1968.
It should be noted that while the Hebrew song is an accurate reflection of Israel being the only Jewish state, the application of this term to Palestinians is inaccurate. Palestinians live in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. UNRWA applies a multi-generational definition of refugee, which is unique to Palestinians. As a result, Palestinians can be born and have citizenship in any country.
Co-director Yuval Abraham did mention October 7 and the hostages briefly in his Oscars acceptance speech. One of the victims he mentioned was Hayim Katsman, an American-Israeli peace activist and academic who worked on the film. Katsman was opposed to the Israeli “occupation” of Judea and Samaria and refused to visit Jewish settlements there. He was involved in several activist groups, including organizing “protective presence” shifts for Palestinian communities in the Hebron Hills. Katsman was murdered in the Holit massacre on 7 October 2023.
Abraham blamed the Oct.7 massacre on the Netanyahu government, saying, “It is no coincidence that the most right-wing government in the history of the country led us to the greatest security disaster in the history of the country….and we know today that in order to release the hostages, we need to stop the war and reach a political agreement so that we can have a life here.”
Ironically, Abraham was slammed on social media by Palestinians for posts he had made perpetuating the “hoax” that Hamas had murdered civilians on Oct. 7, as well as raping and torturing hostages.
The films claims about Masafer Yatta raise serious doubts as to whether the film can be accurately described as a documentary. Adra claims that Palestinians have lived there for hundreds of years and that Israel suddenly decided to evict them. In reality, this was abandoned land that nomadic Bedouins occasionally used for seasonal grazing and sometimes took shelter in the caves. Palestinian construction in the area only began in the 1990s.
Regavim, an NGO that monitors illegal construction in Judea and Samaria, has fully documented the history of Masafer Yatta:
“The area was designated as IDF Firing Zone 918, covering an area of some 33,000 dunams, in the early 1980s by military ‘designation order (Closure Order 2/80/ס of 8 June 1980). As early as 1993, the Israeli Air Force conducted attack training in the area. These were full-scale military exercises—of the kind that made permanent residence impossible. This fact alone proves that no permanent settlement existed there.
“During this period, the Civil Administration carried out active law enforcement procedures, removing illegal structures that were built in violation of the military designation order. At the same time, Arab farmers and shepherds were given access to the firing zone during lulls in the training schedule (generally over weekends and on Jewish and Israeli holidays). The government went so far as to agree not to use the zone for live training during two specified periods annually, to allow seasonal planting and harvesting of crops and grazing of livestock.
“In 1999, Palestinians filed a petition with the court but have never provided any proof of ownership. Despite being rebuked by the judge on this point, the Palestinians continued to build.”
“In the year 2000, a group of 85 Arabs (later joined by an additional 112) appealed to the High Court of Justice against demolition orders that had been issued for the illegal structures they had built in the firing zone. A temporary injunction issued as a result of this petition ”froze” the situation on the ground – in other words, suspended demolition of the existing structures, prohibited new construction, and permitted the appellants to continue to use the area for grazing and “temporary residence for purposes of grazing” in part of the zone.
“The petition was heard and deliberated upon for 12 years (!). In August 2012 a decision was handed down, extending the temporary injunction and the agreed upon arrangements (freezing the situation on the ground, permitting grazing and seasonal agricultural access two months per year as well as year-round residence in the northeastern section of the firing zone, where only “dry” maneuvers and drills would be carried out). Under the protective umbrella of the temporary injunction, and thanks to the state’s attorney’s foot-dragging management of the case, enforcement procedures were, in fact, frozen – but extensive illegal construction continued in full force.
More petitions were filed while illegal Arab construction continued. The High Court also found that many of the appellants owned permanent residences in the Palestinian Authority-controlled town of Yatta.
“Until 1980, the photographs show no signs of any residential presence of any kind, and certainly no permanent residence,” Regavim reported. “Over the course of the 1990s, and more particularly beginning in 2000, the aerial photographs document a construction boom in the firing zone.
“The appellants’ claim of permanent residence in the area prior to the military designation of the firing zone was thus proven to be false,’ the court concluded.
It should be emphasized that all of the construction, including schools and medical facilities, was funded by European entities.
“Arab squatters, supported and funded by foreign governments and anti-Israel organizations, set up a network of illegal outposts inside an active military training ground,” Regavim wrote. “The squatters spent years in Israel’s Supreme Court in an attempt to block the demolition of their outposts – but their claims of indigeneity, victimhood, homelessness and dispossession were disproven by the very evidence they brought to the court.
“The Palestinian propaganda film ‘No Other Land’ ignores the facts, disregards years of legal consideration, makes no attempt to present another side of the specious narrative of displacement and occupation, and glosses over a host of very problematic facts that arise in the film itself, such as the fact that the star of the show and his family make their living from an illegal – and massively polluting – petrol station in the middle of the desert, or the massive financing for the entire illegal enterprise provided by foreign actors. There is no mention of the Oslo Accords, the bedrock of international law that makes the EU’s support illegal, nor is there any attempt to explain why so many foreign “tourists” live in the “villages” of Masafer Yatta.
Meir Deutsch, Director General of the Regavim Movement said, “This is a propaganda film that serves the false Palestinian narrative and seeks to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel in the international arena in order to cause boycotts and sanctions of IDF fighters. The film serves the pro-Palestinian agenda that seeks to advance political and legal steps against Israel; to this end, it presents the rule of law in Israel as illegitimate and harms Israel’s ability to maintain order and enforce the law in Judea and Samaria.”
“The State of Israel must not abandon the public diplomacy arena and must present the historical truth to the world,” Deutsch continued. “At the same time, it must stop the entry into Israel of foreign anarchists who continue to operate in Judea and Samaria and cause unrest on the ground. Because, really – we have no other country.”
Head of the Har Hebron Regional Council Eliram Azoulay added, “We who live in the area know the truth: we have seen Hamas use the same propaganda and lies, presenting the Arabs as downtrodden victims of occupation while at the same time creating a de facto Palestinian state by building strangleholds of illegal construction around Jewish communities as the anarchists that work with them ignite confrontations that produce the juicy images for Palestinian propaganda.”
“I call upon the Minister of Defense to uphold the High Court ruling and launch an operation to evacuate all illegal construction in the firing zone immediately. There is no better time than this. The public diplomacy arena requires the immediate attention of our government. The attempt to banish Jews from the Har Hebron region is a small part of the attempt to remove us from every inch of the Land of Israel.”
But anti-Israel agendas are nothing new at the Oscars. Last year, Artists4Ceasefire organized a protest against Israel by calling on artists to wear a red pin with a hand. Many Oscar attendees did so. The pins were not worn this year because many Jewish groups protested the symbol.
A pro-Israeli Hollywood collective known as “The Brigade” issued a statement, explaining their position.
“In 2000, Palestinian terrorists in Ramallah lynched two innocent Israelis, ripped them apart limb by limb, and held up their blood-soaked hands to a cheering mob. That infamous image is now your ‘ceasefire’ badge. Is this ignorance? Or is this deliberate, calculated malice?” the statement read.
It should be noted that Artists4Ceasefire was organized two weeks after the October 7 attacks, with the stated goal of stopping US arms shipments to Israel.
“On February 20th, the same day the world learned 10-month-old Kfir Bibas and his 4-year-old brother Ariel were strangled to death by their terrorist captors in Gaza, you doubled down, urging celebrities to proudly wear your bloodstained red hand pin. Have you no shame?” the statement continued.
The BBC was recently slammed for a Gaza documentary titled, “How To Survive A Warzone.” After release, it was revealed that the child narrator is the son of Ayman Alyazouri, who has worked as Hamas’s deputy minister of agriculture. The boy was paid for his work, raising questions of whether any financing went to Hamas.
The BBC said in a press release that the review had identified “serious flaws in the making of this program,” which was produced by UK company Hoyo Films.
The Telegraph also reported that the English translation of the film repeatedly mistranslated certain words in an attempt to “whitewash” the statements of the ordinary Gazans who were interviewed in the documentary. The Arabic words for “Jew” and “Jews” were translated to “Israelis” or “Israeli forces,” and all mentions of “Jihad” were translated to “battle” or “resistance.”
