Honestly, I haven’t watched the Oscars in a long time. I lost interest when they ceased to be a gathering of talent recognized by their peers. Granted, I don’t only want to be entertained; I also look for movies, documentaries, and shorts to educate me, but not to indoctrinate me with political venom. I wish that actors would stay in their lane and give us the entertainment we all crave in the world we live in.
Have the Oscars become a platform for political discourse and propaganda? I am afraid they have! The most apparent proof might be the documentary No Other Land, which was just released in 2024 and snatched the 2025 Oscar for Best Documentary. The movie is currently very difficult to watch in the USA, and I am still trying to acquire a complete copy. All that can be viewed, is the trailer, and when one understands that a trailer is made to pull the audience in with the most thought-provoking and challenging footage, we quickly get the idea behind the movie.
It appears the trailer is solely focused on pointing the finger at Israel. The directors used all the politically correct buzzwords and seemed well-received by the Hollywood royalty present at the ceremony. They heard what they wanted to hear. Some in the crowd were probably not in complete agreement with the directors, but the peer pressure on the topic of Israel/Palestine is so heavy that they probably succumbed to cognitive dissonance just to fit in with the majority view on Israel.
Additionally, the acceptance speech by the two directors spoke volumes about the agenda behind the documentary. The Arab director, Basel Adra was the first to speak to the audience. He spoke of “occupation” and “ethnic cleansing,” and then Israeli Director Yuval Abraham spoke of “ethnic supremacy” and also declared, “My people can be truly safe if his people can be truly free.”
The trailer paints the Palestinians as righteously indignant victims and the Israelis as bloodthirsty occupiers, but unfortunately, it is a bit more complicated than such a clear-cut description. Additionally, we must always take into consideration that both sides are never going to be squeaky clean. A quick assessment of factual history is once again necessary.
โข Occupation: In a recent JNS article, Joel Margolis wrote: “The 1920 San Remo Treaty and 1922 Palestine Mandate, under the supervision of the League of Nations, created the state that became Israel. The West Bank, known historically as Judea and Samaria, was part of that allocated territory. These instruments of international law were justified by widespread recognition that the designated land was the ancestral homeland of the Jews.”
The San Remo Conference validated “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
The Palestine Mandate stipulated that “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country;”
โข Ethnic Cleansing: Like a broken record, the claim of ethnic cleansing keeps coming back, accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing’s purpose is to rid a specific country of a particular people group like the Nazis tried to do with the Jews or the Romas (Gypsies.) The Armenian Genocide (over one million killed) and the Rwandan Genocide (almost one million killed) are two examples of genuine attempts at ethnic cleansing. There is no ethnic cleansing or genocide when the people claiming victimhood are demographically more numerous today than when they started to claim genocide. In 1948, about 600,000 Arabs lived in British Mandate Palestine, and today, there are over two million living freely in the same area now known as Eretz Yisrael (Land of Israel). Hardly a demographic reduction, is it?
โข Ethnic Supremacy: Another lie being promoted is the idea that Israelis are ethnically superior to Palestinians and have more rights. Why do we not hear about the two million Arabs living inside Israel who have more rights than in any neighboring Muslim country where they might be living or coming from? What about the fact that Israeli Arab citizens have the right to vote in Israel? Did you know that the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) includes Arab political members as part of the Ra’am Party or United Arab List? Let’s name one Muslim country where Jews have equal rights and can be members of government, just one. There is none!
โขย Freedom and Safety:ย Yuval Abraham spoke of his Arab co-director, saying, “My people can be truly safe if his people can be truly free.” What parallel universe is Mr Abraham from? People of goodwill will all agree that we do want peace. We also want freedom and safety for all people. I have no reason to believe that Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham are being dishonest about their desire for the end of the Arab/Israeli conflict. I commend them for their willingness, but I am shocked at how naive they are. Actually, it is more than naive, it is delusional. If the bloody carnage of October 7, 2023, taught us anything, it is that Hamas’ hatred for Israel is viral, deep and evil. Not all Palestinians hate the Jews, but 76% support Hamas’s crimes against humanity. Hamas has been free to rule Gaza since 2006, with no “Israeli occupation” or “ethnic cleansing.” Hamas’s freedom brought the opposite of Israeli safety. It brought 1,200 Israeli citizens to their gruesome deaths.
It is true that the movie is about Judea and Samaria, not Gaza, but the narrative is the same. It is a shame that the Oscars ceremony first became a political platform for propaganda, but also that that platform is now being used to spew unjustified anti-Jewish hatred. An Oscar for an openly antisemitic movie brings Jew hatred to a new low. What’s next? Maybe a new Nobel prize category, “The Nobel Prize for Antisemitism”! I wouldn’t put it past them.
