Last night’s Oscars ceremony honored the film No Other Land with an award, but the acceptance speeches unwittingly paid homage to an old classic, the 1966 big-screen adaptation of A Man For All Seasons. “It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world,” Paul Scofield’s Sir Thomas More famously says upon the realization that his friend betrayed him for the reward of being appointed attorney general for Wales. “But for Wales?”
No Other Land is about an illicit Palestinian settlement built on land designated for Israeli military training. The film takes the perspective of Palestinian settlers. Accepting the award for best documentary feature were two of the directors, a Palestinian named Basel Adra and an Israeli named Yuval Abraham.
Adra spoke entirely of Israeli wickedness and the virtue of Palestinians “resist[ing]” it. Abraham, playing the “good Jew,” joined his friend and colleague in bashing Israel, though he added a token call for the Israeli hostages to be returned. It would be condescending to praise an Israeli for saying literally the bare minimum on behalf of Israeli hostages, so I’ll leave that to others who had even lower expectations for Abraham.
The more interesting part was the reaction to Abraham’s self-flagellation from Palestinian advocates watching the broadcast at home. Boy, did they hate it.
They hated, in fact, Abraham’s presence on the stage and involvement in the film, which tainted it irredeemably in their eyes.
“Any ‘pro-Palestinian Israeli’ that does not support the Palestinian resistance is nothing more than a Zionist,” wrote one Palestinian journalist of what he called “the resistance test,” a way to weed out from discussion those who think Jews deserve to live.
“Palestinians deserve to tell our story without needing Zionist validation,” whined an infamous New York-based anti-Semitic activist regarding the presence of a Jew in the production.
The writer Ella Kenan took note of the wave of social-media users complaining about Abraham being a Zionist—in other words an Israeli who believes Israelis should be allowed to exist—including a popular Palestinian propaganda X channel. Throughout the thread there are complaints that the film accepts the existence of Israel, disqualifying it from representing true solidarity, and that Abraham mentioned the hostages.
What’s interesting here is the assumption that Abraham’s involvement helped the film gain visibility not because he is good at his work but because he is a Jew and Hollywood supposedly still requires Jewish mascotry. Nor is it suggested that perhaps Abraham’s perspective as an Israeli is helpful to the story being told. The most telling of the complaints was also one of the more popular ones: that the Oscars victory heralds “normalization,” the idea that Jews and Arabs can work together or be friends.
The problem for these Palestinian activists, then, is simply: coexistence. Abraham helped make this documentary because, he says, he believes in coexistence. But he has badly misread his audience. Fans of an agitprop production like this aren’t in it for the coexistence, they’re in it for the resistance. To them, to get up on stage and suggest an equivalence between an innocent Israeli baby murdered in captivity and the Hamas terrorist responsible for that murder is offensive—to the Hamasnik.
“There is a different path,” Abraham said in his acceptance speech last night. That path, he said, is one of “national rights for both of our people.” Then he said something rather sad: “I have to say… the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path.”
In fact, the foreign policy of the United States has done the opposite. For half a decade now, U.S. policy has been structured around Arab-Israeli peace deals, expanding coexistence and mutual recognition in the region. But while numerous Arab polities have embraced this path, the Palestinians have not. This path has been open to the Palestinians for decades; an explicit offer of full “national rights for both… people” has been on the table for a quarter-century. But America cannot force the Palestinians to say yes to their own state.
No doubt Abraham’s phone has been ringing off the hook with industry insiders and peers and peace activists telling him how brave he is. Their admiration is not nothing—Abraham’s career depends on earning just this type of praise from just those types of people. He won’t get the whole world, but he might get his Wales. And a whole lot of resentment from the people he thinks he’s doing all of this for.
