No Other Land poster advertising its Audience Award at the Leeds International Film Festival 2024. Photo: Instagram/LIFF.
By Masar Badil – Mar 3, 2025
The documentary No Other Land won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, considered by some to be a victory for the Palestinian cause in the global cinematic scene. However, when we examine the details of the film and its content, it is clear that this is not a victory for the Palestinian narrative, but one granted to the narrative of “cooperation” and normalization through the character of “Israeli” director Yuval Abraham, who, through his position in the Western and Zionist system, granted the film the necessary perceived legitimacy to reach the platform at the Oscars.
Abraham, despite defining himself as a supporter of Palestinian rights in some form, remains part of the colonial system that produced the Nakba and the subsequent displacement, occupation and settler colonization. This director lives on a confiscated land, from which its indigenous Palestinian inhabitants were displaced, and today comes to tell his story as if he were a neutral mediator, giving voice to his “suffering” within the expressive frameworks allowed by western cultural institutions. But what kind of story is that? It is a narrative that bears his signature, not the signature of the Palestinian people themselves. Here lies the heart of the problem: it is not the Palestinian who narrates his pain and his resistance as the primary protagonist, but the Israeli who grants him the legitimacy of existence within the Western cinematographic space. This clearly reflects how the Palestinian issue is treated from a colonial perspective, even in the context of proclaimed solidarity. The Palestinian is always portrayed as a victim who needs someone to define him and translate his suffering into a language that the West understands, and that language can only be the language of the colonizer himself.
In Yuval Abraham’s speech on receiving the award, he denounced the resistance actions of October 7, 2023, as if they were the beginning of the tragedy in Palestine, ignoring the fact that the Palestinian catastrophe has continued for over 75 years. Abraham did not mention the Nakba, settler colonialism, name the genocide, or address the ongoing displacement. Instead, he seemed to equate occupation with resistance to occupation, adopting a vague liberal discourse that rejects the most visible forms of ethnic cleansing but does not refer to its roots. This speech satisfies the Western establishment that adopts the narrative that “both sides are guilty,” but does not represent the true Palestinian narrative. Instead, it distorts it and reproduces it according to a view that does not disturb the system that awarded the film its prize.
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Let’s be honest: No Other Land won because one of its directors is an Israeli Jew, not because it carries the Palestinian narrative. If the film were purely Palestinian, it would not have made it to the Oscars so easily. This is not an exaggeration, but a fact that can be proven by comparing how the Academy deals with Palestinian films that do not carry an Israeli signature. Dozens of Palestinian films documenting massacres, demolitions and displacements did not receive this appreciation because they did not use the “appropriate narrative,” the narrative that could formulate the Palestinian tragedy in a way that would not challenge the western system but rather be in line with it. What is even more surprising than the award itself is the distorted speech that accompanied its celebration. Some Palestinians and Arabs celebrated the victory as if it were a victory of the cause, ignoring the fact that the Palestinian narrative was not presented here on its own terms (as by co-director Basil Adra), but in terms of its Israeli narrator.
How can we celebrate a film that does not give Palestinians the authority to narrate and define their actual historical and political context, but rather highlights the vision of the Israeli “sympathizer” that determines what can be said and what cannot be said?
To accept this award as a victory for the Palestinian cause is to accept the continued marginalization of the Palestinian voice and the continued confinement of our narrative to structures acceptable to the colonizer. No Other Land is not a victory, but a reproduction of domination, where the Palestinian remains the subject of the narrative, not its owner.
