BDS movement rejects Israeli-Palestinian Oscar winner ‘No Other Land’
Anti-Israel boycott group says film about West Bank home demolitions violates ‘anti-normalization guidelines’; Israeli government has denounced it as slanderous
Luke Tress is The Times of Israel's New York correspondent.
The anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement on Wednesday condemned “No Other Land,” an Oscar-winning Israeli-Palestinian documentary.
The film chronicles Israel’s demolition of Masafer Yatta, a Palestinian West Bank village in a designated IDF live-fire training zone.
The condemnation by the anti-Israel group stood out because the film was led by Palestinians as well as Israelis, and was seen as a harsh criticism of Israel, drawing backlash from Israeli officials and supporters.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), part of the boycott movement, said in a statement on the BDS website that the film “violates the BDS movement’s anti-normalization guidelines.”
The film violates those guidelines because some of the production team’s Israeli members “are not on record supporting the comprehensive rights of the Palestinian people,” the statement said.
The film’s directors made a statement accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide, but the BDS group said the statement was insufficient.
PACBI also said that “Palestinians do not need validation, legitimation or permission from Israelis to narrate our history, our present, our experiences, our dreams, and our resistance.”
The group said it had not made an earlier statement because the film was not a priority before the Oscars, but due to its win, PACBI was compelled to speak out.
The film won the Oscar for best documentary feature on Sunday.
Taking the stage at the Oscars in Los Angeles, two of the film’s four co-directors — an Israeli and a Palestinian — used their acceptance speeches to call for Palestinian rights and a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Masafer Yatta has been a rallying point for the anti-Israel movement for years.
In 1979, the army expropriated some 30 square kilometers (11.5 square miles) of land in the area and declared it Firing Zone 918. Since then, the Israeli military has sought to evict Palestinians living in eight villages that lie inside the firing zone, most of them collections of low-slung homes with makeshift roofs.
Local Palestinians argued that their presence predates the firing zone, meaning that they cannot be expelled under Israeli law. Israeli authorities contested the Palestinians’ argument and government attorneys presented satellite photos that they claim show no residential structures on the hilltops before the 1990s.
The BDS campaign advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israeli businesses, universities and artists. Supporters say BDS is a nonviolent movement for Palestinian independence. Israel and its supporters say the movement aims to delegitimize and eradicate the Jewish state, and it has been condemned by many as antisemitic and discriminatory.
Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar decried the Oscar win for “No Other Land,” calling it “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, and after the massacre of October 7 and the ongoing war, it doubly hurts,” he stated.
