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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ANGER OVER ‘NO OTHER LAND’ REFLECTS DYSFUNCTION OF
ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN ‘ALL OR NOTHING’ DIVIDE  
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Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib
March 4, 2025
The Wrap
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_ The Oscar-winning documentary provoked reactions along the fault
lines of the ongoing conflict. _

For Palestinians, the national emblem symbolizes resistance and
pride. However, Israel has long banned it, seeing it as an incitement
to terrorism., La Croix International

 

Predictably, the Oscar award for the documentary film “No Other
Land” generated reactions among the classic fault lines of the
Israel and Palestine conflict. Some believed it was a courageous work
that highlighted the value of non-violent activism and cooperation
between Palestinians and Israelis to challenge unjust forms of a
military occupation regime that continuously pushes Palestinians out
of lands they have lived on for generations and seeks to erase their
connection to that land permanently. 

Others thought that the timing of the movie was tone deaf and that
affording it this major platform was a political message by
Hollywood’s elites who wanted to virtue signal their support for
Palestinians at a time when many Israelis are still reeling from the
consequences of Oct. 7, the pain of the Bibas family tragedy and the
continued suffering of hostages still in Hamas’s captivity. 

Notably and despite winning an Oscar, the film does not have a
distributor in the United States except for a few independent theaters
that will be showing it – something that casts doubt on the notion
of a concerted effort by Hollywood to elevate a film about
Palestinians while also failing to allow it to be seen by the masses
in the United States. 

For many who support the Palestinian people, there is genuine
excitement that finally, the days of marginalizing the Palestinian
story, experience, and voices are gone – that this film is part of a
broader trajectory of a shift in global public opinion to acknowledge
the plight of Palestinians and push for their cause to be front and
center in the western world which is seen as the ultimate enabler of
Israel’s sustained military occupation of the Palestinian people. 

Art and film have emerged as powerful tools for telling the
Palestinian story and engaging in a form of perseverance and
non-violent activism in the face of power imbalances and injustice. In
the absence of effective diplomacy and given the futility of armed
resistance, these efforts might just be what gets desperately lacking
attention to the experience of the thousands of Palestinians who are
constantly facing the risk of expulsion and displacement. 

What has been intriguing and at times disturbing to observe among some
“pro-Israel” detractors of the film is that any mention of
Palestinian suffering or recognition of Palestinians on a major
platform such as the Oscars triggers such a visceral response that can
be broken into several categories. There is a fair amount of bigotry
whereby a reference to the Palestinians is reflexively met with
prejudiced reactions that deny the very existence of Palestinians as a
people. For some it feels impossible to talk about Palestinians
without immediately engaging in whataboutism and bringing up Hamas,
the hostages, terrorism and other issues. A few seemed to think that
no amount of films, activism, or international solidarity will change
the fact that Palestinians’ freedom and independence can only come
by directly working with Israelis to overcome the various issues that
have prevented a resolution to the conflict. Others were willing to
accept Palestinians being acknowledged at the Oscars but felt that
there was no space afforded to Israelis and their suffering following
Oct. 7 and that the conversation and discourse have been unfairly
skewed in favor of one side. 

Separately, it has been frustrating to observe
“anti-normalization” cultists and freaks who are against the film
because they believe it only won a platform as a result of it being
jointly produced by a Palestinian and an Israeli. There is a fervent
attitude that anything Israeli automatically means colonizer and
oppressor even when it entails expressions of allyship and solidarity
and even when Israeli partners help elevate otherwise neglected and
overlooked Palestinian stories. 

Unfortunately, this film is another painful demonstration of the
dysfunctional dynamics prevalent in this conflict. Despite the
imbalance of power dynamics between Palestinians and Israelis, there
is and should be space for the suffering of both peoples to include
the realities of military occupation in parts of the West Bank and the
horrendous consequences of Hamas’s terrorism on Oct. 7. The
insistence on adopting reductionist black and white, oppressed and
oppressor dynamics and frameworks will never help break the vicious
cycle and disrupt the entrenched narratives, even if there is some
truth to parts of these claims.

Most importantly, the cultist insistence that Jewish-Israelis by
default are occupying colonizers even if they are steadfast allies to
the Palestinian people is wrong, unhelpful, ridiculously ineffective,
and shows a prejudiced unwillingness to acknowledge any form of
partnership with Israelis simply because of their mere existence and
who they are. 

If you haven’t seen the movie but are upset by its message, you
should watch it and judge for yourself. If you don’t believe in any
form of cooperation between the two people because you are
“anti-normalization,” then be a bit more explicit in saying that
you will never tolerate the existence of Israeli Jews and stop
pretending that you simply are pursuing peace and justice when in
fact, you want the erasure of an entire people – making you no less
detrimental than the violence of occupation and the settlement
enterprise.

AHMED FOUAD ALKHATIB_ is an American writer and analyst who grew up in
Gaza City, having left in 2005 as a teenage exchange student to the
United States. He writes extensively on Gaza’s political and
humanitarian affairs and has been an outspoken critic of Hamas and a
promoter of coexistence and peace as the only path forward between
Palestinians and Israelis._

* Film
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* Documentary Film
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* Film Review
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* 'No Other Land'
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* Isreal/ Palestine
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* Oscar Winner
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