On Sunday, the Israeli-Palestinian co-production No Other Land was awarded an Academy Award for best documentary. The Oscar – a first for Palestine – has now been added to the list of 45 awards that the film has won since its release in 2024, including best documentary in the 2024 European Film Awards, the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival, and the 2024 Gotham Awards.
The feature has received widespread critical acclaim and glowing five-star reviews in international media. It has been screened around the world and has consistently sold out in independent screenings in the United States. And yet, no US distributor would pick it up to show it nationwide. The only reason for that is its subject matter: Palestine.
The documentary follows the lives of Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta, an area near Hebron in the southern occupied West Bank, which the Israeli army has declared a “military zone”. Under this pretext, Israeli troops and illegal settlers regularly harass its residents and destroy their houses, rendering them homeless. The story is told through the lens of co-directors Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist.
This raw, harrowing depiction of Israel’s ongoing crimes is something distributors are clearly afraid of showing. And this is in a country that prides itself on its constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.
The distributors’ fear is a great illustration of just how massive the campaign is to erase Palestine in the US, affecting every aspect of public life – from education to the media, and to arts and cinema.
Of course, anti-Palestinian censorship is nothing new. Since 1948, Palestinian culture and history have continually faced attempted erasure as Israel has tried to justify its land grab, claiming the Palestinian people do not exist and have no right to their own land. This narrative has also dominated public perceptions in Western countries that have supported Israel throughout its existence – foremost among them the United States.
Maintaining this narrative has been key to continuing political support.
If the American public is exposed to more information about what is happening in Palestine, if Palestinians are humanised in the mainstream, if they are given a platform to tell their stories of experiencing genocide and apartheid, then public opinion would start shifting dramatically.
It already is. Various polls over the past year showed that Americans, especially Democrats, disagreed with their government’s policies on Israel-Palestine. The majority of Democrats supported a ceasefire in Gaza when President Joe Biden’s administration was refusing to endorse it. This stance ultimately cost Kamala Harris countless votes in the presidential election.
A significant change in public opinion on Israel-Palestine would make it hard for the US Congress to sustain the multibillion-dollar financing of the Israeli military and political support for occupation and apartheid.
That is why the erasure campaign – spearheaded by Israel itself – against Palestinian voices, stories and history must be maintained.
But the challenges No Other Land has experienced since its release are not just another clear-cut case of anti-Palestinian censorship.
The film has shared storytelling between a Palestinian and an Israeli. It is not solely Adra’s voice that is heard in the documentary talking about what is happening in Palestine, but also Abraham’s.
As the latter acknowledged during his award acceptance speech at the Oscars: “Together, our voices are stronger.” Indeed, if the film was fully Palestinian-made, it would have been labelled as biased and struggled to garner the same level of global attention. Having an Israeli co-director has probably opened some doors, but it also made it more “dangerous”.
In his speech, Abraham said: “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. There is a different path. A political solution without ethnic supremacy.”
The idea of an Israeli such as Abraham expressing opposition to apartheid and occupation is clearly not tolerated. It does not fit the mainstream narrative that Israel is the moral compass and that all Palestinians only wish for the obliteration of all Jews.
There are many Jewish Americans who share Abraham’s views and have spoken out against Israel. They have not only been branded as “self-hating Jews” by Israel supporters but have also been harassed, censored, accused of anti-Semitism and even arrested during demonstrations.
Such attacks under the guise of “countering anti-Semitism” and “out of concern for Jewish safety” have actually made many Jewish people unsafe.
Abraham himself was made to feel “unsafe and unwelcome” in Germany – the very country that has made its reason d’etre the protection of Israel and Jewish people – after his award acceptance speech at the Berlin Film Festival last year.
German politicians rushed to label his speech “anti-Semitic”, while the website of the city of Berlin described No Other Land as “exhibiting anti-Semitic tendencies”.
Like the US, Germany has only doubled down on support for Israel since the start of its genocidal campaign in Gaza. In this way, both countries, like the rest of Israel’s Western supporters, have become barriers to peace.
Abraham alluded to this very point during his acceptance speech, saying it is US “foreign policy helping block the path” to peace.
Despite all the challenges it has faced, No Other Land has achieved remarkable success. Hoping still to reach a wider audience in the US, the filmmakers have opted to self-distribute across select theatres. To find out where the film is screening, you can visit its website.
No Other Land is a powerful film that Americans must see. As Adra pointed out in a recent interview for Democracy Now, we hold responsibility. Our tax money is funding the destruction of his community, which has only accelerated in the past year.
A few weeks before the Oscar win, Adra wrote on social media: “Anyone who cared about No Other Land should care about what is actually happening on the ground… Masafer Yatta is disappearing in front of my eyes.”
Americans must take action.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
