The documentary “No Other Land,” co-directed by Palestinian journalist and activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, won the Oscar for best documentary feature film on March 2 — marking the first time a Palestinian film has won an Academy Award. Despite cause for celebration, many have criticized the film’s win for promoting normalization, with some igniting calls for a boycott.
The film, nominated alongside three other documentaries, captured the incremental demolition of Masafer Yatta’s villages in the occupied West Bank and the subsequent expulsion of its people by Israeli authorities. As he accepted the award, Adra spoke about his hopes for his daughter to not live the same life he is living, “always fearing settler violence, home demolitions, and forced displacement” under Israeli Occupation.
“‘No Other Land’ reflects the harsh reality we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” Adra said in his acceptance speech.
Abraham criticized U.S. foreign policy for its role in blocking a path forward amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He condemned the systemic inequality within Palestine, noting that “When I look at Basel, I see my brother, but we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law but Basel has to live under military laws that destroy his life and he cannot control.”
However, Abraham’s remarks were not well received online for claiming that he and Adra were “intertwined.” In an article for Mondoweiss, Nada Elia, a Palestinian writer, called Yuval’s speech a “masterpiece of liberal hasbara, saviorism, and ‘both sides-ism.’” Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian writer and poet, posted on his social media channels saying, “I don’t want my life to be intertwined with an occupier’s.”
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a group of Palestinian academics and intellectuals based in Ramallah, released a statement on March 5 addressing the widespread online discourse over the documentary’s Oscar win.
“While PACBI understands the debate around the film as an indicator of the growth of the popular resistance to normalization, which we appreciate, it strives to enact ‘strategic radicalism,’ prioritizing the most complicit targets where we can achieve the most impact, guided by our principles and our overarching goal of ending international complicity in Israel’s oppression and advancing the struggle for Palestinian liberation,” the statement reads.
The PACBI — part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign — stated that the documentary “violates the anti-normalization guidelines in several ways” within the BDS movement, attributing the violations to the failure of collaboration with Israeli filmmakers to meet the two conditions laid out by the guidelines.
The first condition stipulates that the Israeli position must publicly recognize the rights of the Palestinian people, including an end to the occupation, apartheid, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees. The second requires that the collaboration must constitute a form of co-resistance against Israel, settler-colonialism, and apartheid.
PACBI recognized that a directors statement was published acknowledging the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians but said that the statement “fails to identify Israel as the perpetrator of these crimes.” Following the release of PACBI’s statement, the film directors updated their statement naming Israel.
“No Other Land,” filmed over a four-year period, follows Adra and Abraham as they document Israel’s military incursion in Masafer Yatta, where an Israeli court greenlit a plan that would displace over 1,000 Palestinians in 2022. Residents of the villages faced immediate expulsion and the demolition of their homes, with Israel classifying the region as a closed “firing zone” for military training purposes — a plan over 40 years in the making, paving the way for illegal settlers to grab land. and yet another example of Israeli aggression on the occupied Palestinian territories and its people.
The historic Oscar win was met with widespread coverage online, including from publications like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and The New York Times. Abraham’s critique of the United States and its role in Israel’s occupation of Palestine and tenuous hostage negotiations particularly drew the attention of major outlets.
The film, also co-directed by Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, has yet to find a U.S. distributor despite a successful run on the film festival circuit, having debuted at the Berlin film festival last year and making its North American premiere at the 62nd New York Film Festival.
