No Other Land won the award for Best Documentary Film at the 97th Academy Awards last night. Directed by Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal (who are Palestinian) and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor (who are Israeli), the documentary showcases the fight to save Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in the southern West Bank where thousands of people who are forcefully displaced and are murdered by Israeli soldiers. As our political editor James Greig wrote in his interview with the directors, it is a situation that has been “ongoing for decades” and has “only escalated since October 7”.  

In their speech, Adra, who is a Palestinian activist, lawyer and journalist, powerfully remarked: “About two months ago, I became a father, and I hope that my daughter will not have to live the same life I am living now. Always fearing surveillance, home demolition, displacement, that my community, Masafer Yatta, is living and facing every day under Israeli occupation. No other land reflects the harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious action to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.” 

His co-director Abraham, an Israeli investigative journalist, continued the speech asserting that: “We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger. We see each other, the atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end. Israeli hostages were brutally taken in the crime of October 7th and must be freed.” 

“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, and Basel is under military law that has destroyed his life and that he can not control. There is a different path, a political situation, without ethnic supremacy and national rights for both of our people. And I have to say, as I am here, the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path. And why? Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe, if Basel’s people are truly free and safe. There is another way. It is not too late for life and the living.” 

No Other Land’s win at the Oscars is incredibly important – but some Palestinian activists have made salient critiques about Israelis and Palestinians making films together. In his book Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, Mohammed el-Kurd writes that within this genre of film, “No one – not the producer of the festival, not the columnist writing a review – seems to care about the content of the film, whether it is good or garbage. What matters is that the film was co-directed, a mode that satisfied a libidinal urge in the viewers.” He continues: “Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted and our excited elevator pitches to another all become masturbatory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer’s fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish.” 

It makes one wonder: if this documentary was made solely by Palestinians, without any narrative, as el-Kurd writes, of “reconciliation between the slayer and the slain”, would it be as celebrated and as welcomed by the elite as it is now? 

No Other Land’s win follows news that Israel has cut off aid to Gaza as they break the ceasefire agreement and pressure Hamas to accept a new deal. As of last week, Israel’s decision to block the entry of temporary housing into Gaza has resulted in the death of six children, who died of hypothermia during a severe cold spell in the Gaza Strip. The genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel has been ongoing for decades and continues today.