The award for Best (Antisemitic) Documentary goes to...
Of the many reviews of the newly Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” none of them even hint at the facts. The film is pure propaganda meant to incite people to hate Israel.
Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
In June of 1982, Israel Prize laureate and much-loved songwriter Ehud Manor was sitting with his wife Ofra in the living room, watching the news on television. The news item was about the First Lebanon War between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization attacking Israel from Lebanon.
Ofra recalled this event vividly: “We saw footage of Israeli soldiers entering Beirut. Ehud broke down. I’m telling you, he was weeping. He said: ‘I cannot take it’ — and then he began jotting down words on a piece of paper.”
Those words went on to become the song, “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” (Hebrew for “I Have No Other Country”) — voted time and again as Israel’s favorite song, and its title morphed into a popular catchphrase throughout Israel.
Two days ago, the 97th Academy Awards (The Oscars) gave its Best Documentary award to a film that plagiarized “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” and conspicuously spun it to demonize Israel.
This film, “No Other Land,” made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, shows the destruction of the “occupied” West Bank’s Masafer Yatta area by Israeli soldiers, as well as the alliance which develops between the Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, according to IMDB.
Of course, the West Bank is not occupied; it is disputed, if we want to be intellectually honest.
What’s more, the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta area is not necessarily Palestinian land. The documentary claims that Masafer Yatta is home to 20 ancient Palestinian villages. That is a myth. There were not 20 ancient Palestinian villages there. All of the structures in the area were built since the 1980s, deliberately as a Palestinian land grab from territory belonging to the State of Israel.
Back in 1881, the British Palestine Exploration Fund noted the following places:
Shảb el Butm, meaning “the spur of the terebinth”
Tuweil esh Shîh, meaning “the peak or ridge of Artemisia”
Khirbet el Fekhît, meaning “the ruin of the fissure”
Khirbet Bîr el ‘Edd, meaning “the ruin of the perennial well”
At Khirbet Bîr el ‘Edd, the British Palestine Exploration Fund noted “traces of ruins, and a cistern,” while at Khirbet el Fekhît, they noted “traces of ruins, and a cave.” Here is the British Palestine Exploration Fund map showing the four (not 20) places:
In other words, the British found no villages, no population, just traces of old ruins.
In 1981, then-Israeli Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon was alarmed at the spread of illegal Palestinian structures moving towards this area. He proposed to turn the area into a firing zone for IDF training:
“I want to tell the representatives of the general staff, we want to offer you additional training areas. Additional training areas must be closed in at the border, [between] the bottom of the Hebron Hills and the Judean Desert. In light of that phenomenon — the spreading of the Arab villagers on the mountainside toward the desert. … We have an interest in expanding and enlarging the shooting zones there, in order to keep these areas, which are so vital, in our hands.”
There is no doubt that his purpose was political to keep the areas empty in light of Arab expansion towards this desert. There is also no doubt that, at the time, there were no permanent structures there. The Regavim NGO describes how these empty areas became today’s Masafer Yatta:
“The shepherds of Yatta would sleep in caves in nearby grazing areas, rather than trekking back to the village each night. After the IDF closed off the area, the shepherds were permitted to continue grazing their flocks there; the IDF gave them a few days’ warning before live-fire exercises to ensure that no one got hurt.”
“The Palestinian Authority seized the opportunity — and began funding construction of permanent structures. Foreign interests jumped right in after them, funding infrastructure projects to support the ‘indigenous farmers’ — laying water and electricity lines that enabled more and more people to set up homesteads on the ‘free’ land.”
Aerial images portray this to be the case, including two such images from 1997 and 2021, showing a village in the area built from scratch.
Meanwhile, the Israeli High Court ruled in 2022 that the people claiming they lived on the land for decades had no case — and that even their own evidence contradicted their claims.
Similarly, the Arabs claimed that the book “Life in the Caves of Mount Hebron” by Yaakov Havakook, published by Israel’s Ministry of Defense in 1985, proved that these villages were permanent. The High Court judges read the book and found that it said the opposite, and moreover, that all the residents of the caves had permanent homes in nearby villages:
“Havakook reiterated that at the time the book was written (1984), it can be seen that every year shepherds from nearby villages used to stay in these ruins and ‘at the end of winter, the shepherd families return and abandon the caves, which were used during the grazing months, and move to their mother villages or to other, more promising grazing places.’ Therefore, the reference to Havakook’s book does not help the petitioners.”
Of the many reviews of “No Other Land,” none of them even hint at the facts here. The film is pure propaganda meant to incite people to hate Israel. One reviewer even said the film “will make you want to throw rocks.”
That is the entire point.
Propaganda exists not to inform but to manipulate people’s emotions. Many reviews mention that the film itself is “resistance,” which in Palestinian parlance means both creating propaganda like this and murdering Jews; there is little distinction between the cognitive war and the kinetic war.
One of the friends of Yuval Abraham, the director of “No Other Land,” was murdered during the Hamas-led massacre on October 7, 2023.
The friend’s name is Hayim Katsman, and he was one of the 31 Americans slaughtered in Israel on that unimaginable day. A dual American-Israeli citizen, Hayim moved to Israel after receiving his Ph.D in Seattle. On the day of the attacks, Hayim used his body to shield his neighbor, Avital, from the incoming bullets. He saved her life.
Of course, Hayim wasn’t mentioned once at the Oscars award ceremony on Sunday — not by his “friend” Yuval or by anyone else.
Last year, as “No Other Land” was making its rounds at (mostly “woke” film festivals), Yuval made a speech at the annual Berlin International Film Festival, where the film won the audience award and documentary film award:
“I want to say, we are standing in front of you now, me and Basel are the same age. I am Israeli, Basel is Palestinian. And in two days we will go back to a land where we are not equal. I am living under civilian law and Basel is under military law. We live 30 minutes from one another, but I have voting rights and Basel does not have voting rights. I am free to move where I want in this land. Basel is, like millions of Palestinians, locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, it has to end.”
Nothing about the contents of this speech is remotely true or accurate. It is a fairy tale version of events that very few Israelis believe (maybe a few percent) because it is completely disconnected from reality and history. Among other things, it ignores:
The decades-long virulent Palestinian terrorism that led to “military law” in parts of the West Bank
The 10 or so attempts that Israel has made since the 1930s to agree to a Palestinian state side-by-side with the Jewish state, all attempts which have been plainly rejected by Palestinian leadership
The tremendous inequality that Jews face (as well as large-scale indoctrination of violent antisemitism) in the Palestinian Territories
As Israel Bachar, Israel’s Consul General in Los Angeles, tweeted yesterday in response to the Oscars ceremony:
“If Hollywood wants to watch a Palestinian documentary, I recommend that they watch the hundreds of hours in which the Palestinians have documented themselves murdering entire families, kidnapping the elderly and infants, and committing every crime against humanity imaginable.”
What Yuval Abraham represents — and what his silence about Hayim Katsman proves — is the deep moral confusion of a tiny fringe within Israeli society, self-hating Israeli Jews who have an embraced both an elitist and defeatist attitude, similar to folks infected by the “Woke” mind virus across the Western world.
This tiny fringe spends far more time trying to demonize their own people than confronting the relentless violence and Jew-hatred emanating from mainstream Palestinian society. They see every Palestinian hardship, real or imagined, as the sole fault of Israel, while ignoring the decades of Palestinian leadership choosing war, terrorism, and rejectionism over peace, coexistence, and prosperity.
Hayim Katsman was everything these wannabe elites claim to admire — a progressive thinker, a peace activist, someone who believed in dialogue. But when Hamas came for him, none of that mattered. To Hamas and countless Palestinians, Hayim was just another Jew.
And to his so-called “friend” Yuval, Hayim’s story is simply inconvenient. It doesn’t fit the narrative. A Jew murdered by Palestinians, after using his body to shield a woman from bullets — this is not the kind of story Yuval and his ideological comrades want to tell.
It forces them to confront uncomfortable truths: that Hamas and its many supporters aren’t fighting for human rights or justice, but for the extermination of Jews. That the hatred is not about checkpoints or settlements — it’s about the mere existence of Israel and Jews in our ancient homeland.
By erasing Hayim at the Oscars, Yuval exposed the moral bankruptcy of his worldview. For all his grandstanding about human rights, equality, and peace, he couldn’t bring himself to mention the brutal murder of his own friend — because the perpetrators were Palestinians, not Israelis. That is the twisted logic of the “Woke” anti-Zionist crowd which self-hating Israeli Jews are desperate for admission to.
The vast, vast, vast majority of Israelis, however, know the truth. They know that peace does not come from slandering your own country on the world stage. Peace comes when Palestinian leadership chooses to abandon terror, recognize Israel as the Jewish state, and finally accept that Jews are not “colonizers” in our own ancestral home. It comes when brave Jews like Hayim are remembered not as inconvenient victims, but as heroes who stood for life, even in the face of death.
Hayim’s story — his bravery, his sacrifice, his love for his neighbors — reflects the true spirit of Israel. Yuval’s silence reflects the moral hollowness of the anti-Israel propaganda machine. One day, perhaps, even Yuval will have to reckon with the truth: that it is only because of Israel — a proud, resilient, and morally clear-headed nation — that he even has the freedom to stand on those stages and speak his corrupted mind.
During the last decade or so, as Israeli filmmakers increasingly look to the outside world for bigger and better opportunities, the “cool” thing to do is to make Israel look as bad as possible. No doubt there are also financial perks that come with this approach as well, which makes it all the more disingenuous.
This trend — where some Israeli filmmakers tailor their work to fit the anti-Israel biases of European film festivals, international grants, and global activist culture — is not just an artistic choice. It’s a business model.
A film that blames Israel for all the region’s problems, paints Palestinians as helpless victims, and portrays the Jewish state as a colonial monster is almost guaranteed to be embraced by the “human rights” circuit. It gets awards in Berlin and Venice, glowing write-ups in The Guardian, and invitations to every “progressive” cultural event from London to New York.
This is not about telling complex or challenging truths. It’s about feeding a global audience exactly what they want to hear — a simplistic, one-sided fairy tale where Israel is the villain, and the Palestinian cause is reduced to a sanitized struggle for freedom, with no mention of terrorism, antisemitism, a grossly fabricated Palestinian narrative, or the explicit calls to annihilate Israel.
The financial perks are very real. European funding bodies have long rewarded projects that align with their pre-existing narratives about Israel. Films that criticize Hamas, or that highlight the very real oppression and violence Palestinian leaders inflict on their own people, don’t get those grants. Films that explore the deep-rooted antisemitism in Palestinian society — the kind that led to the October 7th massacre — won’t win prizes. There’s no appetite for nuance. There’s no reward for honesty.
And so, an entire generation of Israeli filmmakers has learned that, if they want to make it internationally, they have to sell out their own country. They have to erase the complexities of the conflict and present a cartoon version of reality — one where Israel is always the aggressor, Palestinians are always innocent, and the real historical context (including the countless times Israel has offered peace, only to be met with violence) is nowhere to be found.
This is not art; it’s propaganda masquerading as art. And what makes it particularly obscene is that this industry exists only because Israel itself fosters a society where freedom of speech and critical filmmaking are protected.
Yuval Abraham could not make a film like “No Other Land” in Gaza or Ramallah if he were a Palestinian criticizing his own leadership. He’d be jailed — or worse. The very fact that Israeli directors can produce these films and proudly screen them worldwide is a testament not to Israeli oppression, but to Israeli democracy.
As bestselling author Samantha Ettus wrote yesterday, “Perhaps nothing demonstrates the diversity of Israel quite like today’s tragic terrorist attack in Haifa, Israel. An Islamist group sent a Druze to kill Jews. He ended up killing a Muslim elderly and being stopped and killed by a fellow Druze.”
Yet these filmmakers never seem to appreciate any of this reality. They giddily trash the country that gave them such freedom, while staying silent about the regimes that would silence or imprison them if they ever directed their cameras the other way.
This is why ordinary Israelis have increasingly lost patience with this small but noisy crowd of self-styled “dissident artists.” They don’t speak for Israel. They don’t represent the majority of Israelis — Jews, Arabs, Druze, and others — who understand the reality we live with every day. And they certainly don’t represent the families of October 7th victims like Hayim Katsman, whose story was inconvenient for their narrative and therefore erased.
If these filmmakers truly cared about human rights, peace, and justice, they would tell the whole story — including the story of Hamas rockets, of murdered children and raped women and men, of peace offers rejected time and again, of Palestinian leaders who steal billions meant to improve their own people’s lives. But that story doesn’t win awards in Hollywood. And so they remain silent.
It’s not courage. It’s not art. It’s cowardice wrapped in self-righteousness.
 | A guest post by
|
I have not and will not see this movie. That said, there is nothing a Palestinian or a far left Israeli can say that justifies the death cults of Palestinians.
The sad part of all of this relating to the Oct 7 massacre that few talk about is that those killed, raped, and taken hostage were doing amazing work helping Gazans, driving children who needed hospital care to Israel hospitals, etc. As to those in Judah and Samaria have tried for years to reach out to the Arabs there, and in return they found themselves threatened on a regular basis. I was in touch with a family who had married children who lived there, Israelis, she was a teacher, he was a carpenter. She taught all day and in evening, she offered various subjects to Arab children who were attending probably UNRWA school. There were about 8, 9, 10 years old and even though they attend their schools 6 days a week, they were not taught how to read, but only memorize by rote the Koran, and only the parts that show contempt for Jews. These children wanted to learn Hebrew and math. A few weeks after school had started, the older boy was found beaten to death, and his parents were charged by the local police, but Arabs thought they were heroes to kill their own for mixing with the enemy. The other children were afraid and stopped coming to the Israeli family. Unfortunately, this Arabs in the region have been so indoctrinated that they killed their own children rather that learn to live with Jews.