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Co-director of documentary about Israeli occupation of West Bank says he faces threats after using award speech to denounce what he described as Israeli “apartheid.”
“No Other Land” follows the expulsion of Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta, an area in the southern West Bank that the Israeli army uses for training, and where Israelis colonists They have attacked the Palestinians.
According to your synopsisthe film uses footage of “the slow-motion eradication of villages in (co-director Basel Adra’s) home region, where soldiers deployed by the Israeli government are gradually demolishing houses and driving out their residents.”
On Saturday, Adra and co-director Yuval Abraham accepted the Best Documentary Award and the Audience Favorite Documentary Award at the Berlin Film Festival, and used an awards speech to highlight the current situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Heading to the festival, Adra saying it was difficult to celebrate “while there are tens of thousands of my people being massacred and massacred by Israel in Gaza,” and while “Masafer Yatta, my community, is also being bulldozed by Israeli bulldozers.” He called on the German government to stop sending weapons to Israel.
And Abraham, for his part, called for a ceasefire, an “end (of) the occupation” and a political solution. When he and Adra return home, he said, “we will return to a land where we are not equal.”
“I live under civilian law and Basel is under military law,” Abraham said. “We live 30 minutes from each other, but I have the right to vote and Basel (does not) have the right to vote. I am free to move wherever I want on this earth. Basel, like millions of Palestinians, is locked in the occupied West Bank. “This apartheid situation between us, this inequality, has to end.”
The comments sparked a fast and furious reaction, Abraham said.
“I’ve been receiving death threats ever since,” Abraham wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday. On Tuesday, he wrote that “a right-wing Israeli mob came to my family’s house yesterday to look for me, threatening close relatives who fled to another city in the middle of the night.” Abraham said he had also canceled his return flight.
Calling the awards speech anti-Semitic, he added, endangers the “life of co-director Adra.”
“He is in much greater danger than I am,” Abraham said.
On Monday, German authorities said they were doing research the “unilateral” nature of the speeches at the event. Israeli public broadcaster Kan called Abraham’s comments “anti-Semitic” (and later I was walking back the label).
Footage after the ceremony showed German Culture Minister Claudia Roth applauding the speech. his office wrote in Xformerly known as Twitter, that his applause “was directed at Jewish-Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, who spoke out in favor of a political solution and peaceful coexistence in the region,” but that he was not applauding. Adra.
Neither director immediately responded to HuffPost’s request for comment on the reaction to their speech. +972 and Local Call, two regional publications where directors have published work in the past, he said in a post on Wednesday They “unequivocally support our colleagues” and said the campaign against the two men is indicative of “alarming trends.”
“It illustrates the depravity of Germany’s discourse on anti-Semitism, which has been twisted to the point of interpreting statements against Israel’s occupation – even by Jews themselves – as anti-Jewish racism. It reflects the growing intolerance of hearing hard truths about Israeli apartheid, not only in places like Masafer Yatta, but also in Gaza, which continues to be besieged and bombed. And it shows that many cannot understand a partnership between Palestinians and Israelis that recognizes their power dynamics and actively co-resists the systems of dispossession and domination that make them unequal under Israeli law.”