This month’s Academy Awards were apparently so dull that the main cause of raised eyebrows was Miley Cyrus’s bleached eyebrows. Among other predictable events, No Other Land won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Made by Israelis and Palestinians, it tells the story of the Palestinian villages that comprise Masafer Yatta in Judea and Samaria (commonly known as the West Bank), and the expulsion of its inhabitants by Israel.

In fact, the film should have inspired a new category, the Joseph Goebbels Award for Best Agitprop. Masafer Yatta was built on state-owned land, which Israel designated as a military training zone in 1981. Under the 1995 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians, the land became part of the administrative area under full Israeli control. Palestinians petitioned Israel’s courts in 2000 to revoke its military zone designation and, while the case continued, they increasingly built permanent structures there. In 2022, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled that the land can be repurposed for military use, finding that the claimants could not prove they were resident there before the military zone was established.

This context is largely absent from the film, inconvenient as it would be to the epic of voracious villain vs virtuous victimised villagers. The filmmakers have also been accused of selective editing and staging scenes, tactics that are defining characteristics of the emotionally manipulative genre that has become known as ‘Pallywood’ to its critics.

None of that chicanery mattered to the Academy, though. On winning the award, to rapturous applause, two of the film’s directors, Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, spoke on stage.

Arda talked of ‘settler violence, home demolitions and forced displacement’ and called to ‘stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people’. Then, Abraham spoke of, ‘The atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end; the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of October 7, which must be freed…. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy lives, that he cannot control. There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people.… Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe?’

Standard anti-Israel fare. Following Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at last year’s Oscars, it seems denunciation of Israel has become as de rigueur as designer gowns and Ozempic. Even so, surely a victory of sorts to be celebrated by Palestinians?

Well, no. Three days after the Oscars, and fresh off its (unsuccessful) campaign to deplatform Israeli actress Gal Gadot from presenting an award there, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel released a statement declaring that the film violates its ‘anti-normalisation guidelines’.

According to its statement, ‘Normalisation is the participation in any project, initiative or activity, local or international, that brings together (on the same ‘platform’) Palestinians (and/or Arabs) and Israelis (individuals or institutions) and does not meet the following two conditions: 1. The Israeli side must publicly recognise the UN-affirmed inalienable rights of the Palestinian people (at the very least an end to the occupation, end to apartheid, and the right of return for Palestinian refugees); and 2. The joint activity must constitute a form of co-resistance against the Israeli regime….’

The statement also noted that, ‘it is important to recognise that Palestinians do not need validation, legitimation or permission from Israelis to narrate our history, our present, our experiences, our dreams, and our resistance…’.

Still confused as to why the film is verboten, I sought out people of Palestinian heritage with tens of thousands of followers on X. Activist Nerdeen Kiswan explained, ‘Framing “coexistence” to resonate with “both sides”… serves a normalisation framework that Palestinians have collectively rejected for decades.’ Her solution is, ‘A decolonised one-state solution, not a binational state, not a state where we are equal to our oppressors.’

Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa stated, ‘The liberal zionist, who peddled the rape hoax for months, who couldn’t say the word genocide, then equates the wholesale slaughter of half a million Palestinians [sic] with Hamas’ singular military operation to capture Israelis in order get their own hostages back. The liberal hops on the back of Palestinian pain and rides that wave as he makes a name for himself, and money… There can be no place in the world for zionism anymore, liberal or otherwise.’

Jennine Khalik tweeted, ‘Trust the Israeli to… chime in with coexistence hogwash.’

And the Sameer Project, an ‘aid initiative led by Palestinians’ asserted, ‘To us, the Oscars is nothing but a celebration of Zionist racist colonial narratives and is the center and face of hypercapitalist fascist elites. Now let alone, when the Oscar’s speech is won by a liberal Zionist that doesn’t even use the word genocide and equates the relationship between coloniser and colonised. This is called normalisation and we Palestinians don’t accept this. We are most definitely not “intertwined” and the fact that he centered Israeli safety and mentioned Israeli hostages from October 7th but not the tens of thousands of Palestinian hostages (including children).’

So I gleaned that Abraham transgressed in various ways. He suggested 7 October was wrong (three people he knew, two of whom were peace activists, were murdered), thereby undermining Palestinian ‘resistance’ as an inalienable right. He did not use the word ‘genocide’ and he suggested that Palestinians and Israelis should be equal and are intertwined. Fundamentally, it seems that Yuval Abraham committed the irredeemably evil act of insisting on existing. For if he is not sufficiently anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian, it is hard to imagine what ‘Zionist’ is, apart from one who surrenders to his own subjugation or slaughter.

The real story about the Israel/Palestinian saga is not in No Other Land itself, but in the reaction to it. There you will find the self-sabotage, violent rejectionism of Jews, hatred of the West and purity over pragmatism that is prevalent in the Palestinian cause. And there you will also find the smugness, ignorance and delusion that prevails in the progressive elite epitomised by Hollywood. It is time that, instead of indulging their imaginations, they do what these Palestinians demand, and give them the credit of reading their own script and taking them at their word. And that word is surely not coexistence.