@raniabatrice.bsky.social Libby Lenkinski Ms.Batrice is a Palestinian American activist and strategist for progressive causes.Ms. Lenkinski is an Israeli American activist and founder of Albi,an organization supporting culture as a vehicle for change in and about Israeli-Palestinian relations. 🧵 - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

voices4justice.bsky.social • 40 days ago

@raniabatrice.bsky.social Libby Lenkinski

Ms.Batrice is a Palestinian American activist and strategist for progressive causes.Ms. Lenkinski is an Israeli American activist and founder of Albi,an organization supporting culture as a vehicle for change in and about Israeli-Palestinian relations. 🧵

Comments

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

If there is any hope for the future, it lies precisely in these partnerships, in collaboration, and in what the filmmakers aptly call “co-resistance.”

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

“No Other Land” is not just a film — it is a statement, a challenge and an act of defiance. The question now is can our collective communities seize this moment and build from it rather than allow the likes of the Israeli government and statements from the B.D.S. movement divide us.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

And while the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement’s stated goal is to fight for liberation and self-determination of the Palestinian people, in this case it has undermined the joint artistic work that directly criticizes the Israeli government.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

The impact of that stance is felt far beyond the Middle East. The week after the Oscar win, the mayor of Miami Beach, Fl., threatened to evict an art house cinema from city-owned property for screening the film.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

I invite all the critics to turn off their air-conditioners, get in a car, and come live here with us for just one week. Then let’s see if they still call on me to boycott the film.”

The Israeli government’s policies seek to render Palestinians invisible and brand their Israeli allies as traitors.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

He continued, “Yuval and dozens like him have lived with us, eaten with us, slept in our homes and confronted soldiers and settlers alongside us every single day.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

I know — not think, know — that without people like Yuval and Jewish activists from Israel and around the world, half of Masafer Yatta’s lands would have been confiscated and razed by now.”

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

settlers rampaging a Palestinian village in the West Bank.

And the role of Mr. Abraham cannot be dismissed. As the head of the council of a nearby village, Susiya, recently told the Palestinian-Israeli magazine +972, “After many years of struggle, confrontations, arrests, beatings and demolitions,

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

The perspective of Mr. Adra is authentic, intimate, urgent and desperate. His struggle to save his village from destruction is not theoretical, nor symbolic, but physical and immediate. Indeed, shortly after he returned from the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles, he posted to Instagram a story of

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

For those of us who have been inhabiting this reality our entire lives, we know it is only getting worse and increasingly dire. All of that makes support for this film and the people behind it that much more important.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

As cultural organizers, we both know that art, and film in particular, can serve a critical role in not only educating audiences, but also in helping to bring about change. “No Other Land” has given a glimpse into the decades-long Palestinian experience and the realities on the ground.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

In fact, he is a journalist and activist from the embattled West Bank village of A-Tuwani, one of the most vulnerable villages in the West Bank, surrounded by violent settlers.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

To suggest that the documentary’s Palestinian filmmakers are being used by their Israeli colleagues for legitimacy or otherwise is to reduce Mr. Adra to a puppet, as if his collaboration were a capitulation rather than an act of agency.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

The campaign wrote out a list of concerns, including taking the filmmakers to task for not sufficiently condemning Israel's conduct in the current war in Gaza and the production help received from an organization that the campaign claims is “engaged in normalization.”

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

This time the backlash did not come from only the Israeli side. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel released a statement on March 5 criticizing “No Other Land,” though the group stopped short of calling for a boycott.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

In a country where incitement has a bloody history, this should not be dismissed as mere rhetoric. It could also be taken as a call to action, a chilling reminder that to tell the truth in Israel can be to put one’s life at risk.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

It is a wearingly familiar pattern in Israel: A government official signals outrage and within hours the ecosystem of extremist groups, hypernationalist influencers and anonymous Telegram channels takes up the cause. Soon, incendiary memes flood social media.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

But the film had not received a shekel of public funding. Its success, despite hostility from the Israeli government, is an indictment of a system that increasingly seeks to silence dissent rather than engage with it.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

Mr. Zohar pointed to the film as an example of the need for regulations he has championed to limit public funding for film and television to projects that aren’t perceived as anti-Israel.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

The day after the Oscars, Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, sent a letter to cultural institutions and cinemas funded by the ministry,urging them not to show the film.“No Other Land,”the minister said,was proof that public funds should not support content that “serves the enemies of the state.”

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

It seems to us that not everyone was as moved as we were by the powerful image of four filmmakers — two Palestinians, two Israelis — holding their golden statuettes together. In winning, the Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking team seemed to be defying the zero-sum logic that dominates the region.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

“We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws. … Can’t you see that we are intertwined?”

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

At the Academy Awards, the filmmakers did not say anything more radical than what they did in Berlin. “‘No Other Land’ reflects the harsh reality that we’ve been enduring for decades,” Mr. Adra told the audience. Mr. Abraham added:

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

Before they returned to the Middle East, Mr. Abraham received death threats, his family faced harassment, and a mob surrounded his family’s home. The immediate threat eventually died down, but even now the film doesn’t have a streaming deal or theatrical distribution agreement in the United States.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

they would be back to unequal realities, one in which Mr. Abraham travels freely and another in which Mr. Adra has no freedom of movement. Mr. Abraham called it an apartheid system, which enraged Israeli media and rattled German allies.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

But success brought backlash. From the awards stage in Berlin, the Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra called for Germany to stop weapons exports to Israel. His Israeli Jewish co-creator Yuval Abraham then explained that, when they returned home,

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

The twist is a story within the story, that of a friendship and resistance effort of two of the four filmmakers, one Palestinian and one Israeli. The film’s achievements, both narrative and emotional, were recognized early: It won the Berlinale documentary award in 2024.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

“No Other Land” documents destruction and a series of forced displacement attempts in the West Bank area called Masafer Yatta from 2019 to 2023, told from the perspective of the Palestinians who are harassed by settlers and whose homes are being demolished by the Israeli military.

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

But not everybody was celebrating. The reception of “No Other Land” became a microcosm of the very struggle the film seeks to document. The Israeli minister of culture referred to the Oscar win as “a sad moment for the world of cinema.”

voices4justice.bsky.social•40 days ago

The Oscar win for “No Other Land” for best documentary ought to have been a triumphant moment for Palestinian and Israeli cinema and society — a rare instance in which artists from both communities stood on the world stage together to receive acclaim for a film they made together.