The award for Best Documentary Feature Film at the annual Academy Awards ceremony on March 2 went to “No Other Land,” a film created by a Palestinian Arab activist, Basel Adra, and an Israeli Jewish activist, Yuval Abraham. 

The film depicts the apparently heroic resistance by Palestinian Arabs against Israel’s alleged attempt to destroy Adra’s community in Masafer Yatta, a collection of Arab settlements in the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria.

As Melanie Phillips has noted, the reality of Masafer Yatta is radically different. The area was never under Palestinian Arab control. The only people with any legal or historical claim to it are the Jews.

In the 1920s, the Jews alone were promised a homeland by the League of Nations throughout what is now Israel, the disputed territories and the Gaza Strip — a binding treaty obligation that has never been abrogated.

Historical records, from Ottoman-era documents to British Mandate maps and Israeli Supreme Court findings, tell a different tale: the area was uninhabited state land until well after it was declared a military training zone by Israel. Aerial imagery from the 1980s shows no sign of permanent settlement, and yet the filmmakers would have us believe in a historical continuity that simply does not exist.

In 1999, Arabs illegally erected homes in Masafer Yatta but failed to obtain building permits from Israel’s civil administration. This violated the Israel and Arab agreed-upon Oslo Accords that gave Israel full control over this area.

In 2022, Israel’s High Court ruled that these homes must be demolished. As a result, the residents moved into nearby alternative dwellings. Many of these condemned structures, however, remained in place in order to provide the illusion of a permanent Arab presence.

Masafer Yatta has produced numerous terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians. Moreover, with the connivance or backing of NGOs such as B’Tselem and Amnesty, its activists harass Jews living in the area by trespassing, damaging property and provoking fights that they film and post online with titles like “settler violence” and “Jewish supremacy”.

In 2021, during a violent incident in Masafer Yatta, an Israeli Defence Forces officer filmed a young Arab setting fire to Arab structures and shouting: “The Jews did it.” The person was none other than Basel Adra (No Other Land) – he was filmed setting fire to Palestinian structures and telling people to shout "the Jews did it" for the cameras.

https://x.com/TheMossadIL/status/1897369845651661079

The Academy Awards’ Documentary Branch explicitly mandates that a documentary should be “nonfiction” and provide an emphasis on “fact rather than fiction.” The Judges seemed not to appreciate the falsehoods and missing context in ‘No Other Land’.  To save the reputation of the Academy Awards, the Award to ‘No Other Land’ must now be rescinded.