Nothing Like a Movie to Take Your Mind Off Things

Chai Be-Seret.

“Living in a movie,” a Hebrew expression referring to someone who is out of touch with reality, who breezes through each day as though nothing could possibly go wrong.

Someone like a lot of Israelis I have met since making aliyah seven years ago.

Who did not think Gaza posed a threat. Who think settler violence in the West Bank is a fringe phenomenon. Who think Palestinian citizens of Israel are happy to live in our enlightened society – and anyway, there is no such thing as a “Palestinian.”

If every generation gets the movie it deserves, this week it was “No Other Land,” co-directed by Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham. It won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Is anyone actually paying attention?

“No Other Land” follows a community in the Masafer Yatta enclave in the South Hebron Hills as they face forced displacement by the Israeli military. Today, the remaining Palestinian and Bedouin residents of Masafer Yatta continue to experience the ongoing threat of home demolitions and expulsion by the army, and repeated attacks by Israeli settlers – including this week – from which the army does not protect them.

If you have not yet seen “No Other Land,” you may have a hard time finding it. The film has not found a distributor in the US, nor is it available for streaming in America. Showing the same determination that led them to make the documentary, the filmmakers have self-distributed “No Other Land.” It was reportedly shown in over 80 movie theaters in the US last weekend.

You may also be too late to visit the place where “No Other Land” was filmed. The Israeli NGO Breaking The Silence – former Israeli soldiers opposed to the occupation – runs weekly tours from Israel to Hebron where former soldiers who served in the West Bank describe the army’s role in the Occupation and the regular abuses heaped on the Palestinian population while the army looks the other way.

Last week, Breaking The Silence reported that the IDF and police turned back their tour buses, preventing some 200 people from visiting Masafer Yatta and speaking with the residents and with the Israeli and foreign activists who provide protective presence, putting themselves at risk by stepping between attackers and residents.

Meanwhile, far from reveling in the accolades of the Academy, Israel’s culture minister Miki Zohar urges venues in Israel not to screen “No Other Land,” accusing it of “slandering Israel on the global stage.” This movie, says Zohar, exemplifies the need to rethink the government’s support of cultural institutions, “to ensure that public resources will be directed to works that speak to the Israeli audience, and not to an industry that makes a career of defaming the country at foreign festivals.” (Of course, no Israeli-Palestinian cultural exchange would be complete without withering condemnation from the Left. On cue, the BDS movement slams the film as propaganda that normalizes the Occupation. Cooperation and friendship between a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli are toxic on all fronts.)

In the wake of Zohar’s condemnation of “No Other Land,” 100 Israeli filmmakers signed an open letter of solidarity with the creators of the Oscar-winning documentary. Minister Zohar is going by the standard playbook and, as of this writing, the community of filmmakers and the media in general are falling in line. Everyone is voicing indignation and disapproval. Yet, instead of arguing about the government’s muscular support for non-governmental actors committing repeated acts of violence in the West Bank, we march and chant and demand the right to watch a movie. Hollywood and Venice and Berlin and Cannes are likely to take the same bold actions they have been noted for in the past: wearing lapel pins on their tuxedoes and making speeches in support of the filmmakers as they toast them with champagne.

In a recent interview with the New Yorker Radio Hour, Yuval Abraham, the Israeli director of “No Other Land,” observes that, in all the months of protest against the judicial reform proposals in Israel, no one raised the issue of the Occupation. At the demonstrations we attended the small – though very noisy, with drums an bullhorns and whistles – group of demonstrators calling for an end to the Occupation were deliberately sidelined, confined to a small space on the fringe of the main demonstration. When the police intervened, it was initially against this group, while the main demonstration continued unmolested bare meters away from the scrum. The main body of protesters – who never allowed the word Occupation to pass their lips – failed to take note: police aggression against the Anti-Occupation protest subsequently morphed into unprovoked violent attacks against demonstrators all across Israel.

History is laden with tragedies, here no less than everywhere in the world. I have walked through West Jerusalem neighborhoods with my Palestinian friends and teachers and seen the homes, the fields, the schools and shops and clinics and orphanages from which their families were evicted at gunpoint. I do not believe for a moment that they will ever regain these properties. But justice takes many forms, and we harm ourselves as a society by refusing to acknowledge history. You cannot repair something if you never admit that it’s broken.

Should Israel defend its borders? Certainly. But there is a world of difference between protecting the nation and expelling shepherds from their homes in Masafer Yatta. Should Israel fight its enemies when attacked? Absolutely. But there is a world of difference between battling Hamas and Hezbollah, and descending on a West Bank farming village in the middle of the night, beating the residents, setting fire to their homes and stealing their flocks.

Israelis fail to grasp the direct connection between gangs of masked Jewish thugs beating defenseless residents of Masafer Yatta, Umm El Khair, and other towns and villages, and the disgraceful scene of Knesset security guards mauling the families of October 7 hostages and preventing them from entering a public room where the fate of their loved ones was being decided. These are two sides of the same debased coin.

Israeli society will not have much stomach to fight for this movie, nor for the communities it depicts. Even the most liberal-minded among us remain angry and traumatized by October 7^th. People are afraid and we do not trust our Arab neighbors enough to take an extra step towards them. Even those most inclined to take up the cause are battling exhaustion and struggling with grief. With what has happened in this country in the last three years, and with fifty-nine hostages still held in Gaza, banning a movie seems the least of our concerns.

Those who want to see “No Other Land” have already seen it. We watched “The Bibi Files” on a wide-screen TV in a friend’s living room and we saw “No Other Land” online. The government has made watching a movie into a subversive act. Let’s not speak about camping out with the activists in Masafer Yatta.

After more than five hundred days, Netanyahu refuses to convene a commission of inquiry, much less to make a deal to bring home the remaining fifty-nine hostages. No one seems capable of forcing the government to behave responsibly. With each new headline, all around me I hear people say, “I don’t know what I would do if things got really bad…”

Once again, speaking truth to power turns out to be a feel-good dance that leads to no lasting change. At least this time they got an Oscar.

Anachnu chayim be-seret?