Hello, and happy Monday!
This correspondence comes to you from the literal crack of dawn as we’re currently in the second week of Ramadan and I’m trying to make more use of the very early starts to the day. Any typos that follow can be attributed to my lack of coffee.
This time last week, I was thrilled to wake up to the news that the 2024 film No Other Land, which follows the lives of Palestinians facing forced displacement Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank community of Masafer Yatta, had been awarded the Oscar for best documentary. What I was less thrilled about, however, was the the backlash that immediately followed — not only from those within the hardline pro-Israel community but, less predictably, from within certain pockets of the pro-Palestine movement.
As I rewatch the acceptance speech delivered by Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, the film’s Palestinian and Israeli co-directors, respectively, I can’t help but wonder if No Other Land’s naysayers and I are talking about the same move. No Other Land casts a spotlight on the brutal reality of Israel’s military occupation better than almost any other film on the topic I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot of them. It’s a project that doesn’t just leave you feeling despairing about the ugly reality that Palestinians have endured under decades of de facto Israeli rule, but enraged. And that’s before you learn that the film still can’t find a U.S. distributor despite the dozens of accolades to its name. (Readers from the U.K. are in luck, as you can stream it on Channel 4 for free here.)
The opposition — from the pro-Palestine camp, at least — seems to be based not on the contents of the film, but on who was involved in making it. One of the earliest criticisms I saw suggested that Abraham, an investigative journalist who has published some of the most damning reporting on the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza, was guilty of “blurring the lines between occupied and occupier” in his acceptance speech. Below is an excerpt from said speech:
“When I look at Basel, I see my brother. But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life and [which] he cannot control. There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people. … Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe? There is another way.”
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), an arm of the grassroots BDS movement, weighed in with its own critique, stating that the film doesn’t align with their “anti-normalization” rules, citing among its reasons some members of the Israeli side of the project’s failure to affirm their opposition to occupation and apartheid and their support for the Palestinian right of return. I’m not sure how PACBI was able to come to such a sweeping determination. What I do know is that it’s one that several of Masafer Yatta residents, the very same Palestinians organizations like PACBI claim to work on behalf of, have rejected outright.
There may be some for whom any kind of Israeli-Palestinian collaboration is a nonstarter. To those, I ask: What is your theory of change? If allyship proved to be consequential in other liberation movements, why is it not good enough here? Do you think this film, which has drawn the world’s attention to the deteriorating situation in the West Bank, shouldn’t have been made? Have you watched it yourself?
As the journalist Murtaza Hussain aptly put it: “Politics is in large part a numbers game about adding more people to a cause to create a critical mass of support. Finding reasons to drive people away who support your cause because you don’t like how they talk, or the style that they’re supporting you, or even what they believe, just seems clearly self-defeating to such an effort. Its pretty easy to drive someone away who supports you by yelling at them and saying they’re not welcome. But once you successfully do that, then what?”
What I’ve read
This essay on MAGA’s embrace of the Tate brothers:
Indulging the Tate brothers to own the libs is an act of pure nihilism. The Tate brothers are a uniquely malevolent force on the viral internet. Denouncing them should be the easiest test of moral seriousness imaginable, and yet it’s a test that many online influencers are failing in real time. Then again, perhaps we shouldn’t be that shocked that much of the MAGA movement would embrace a boastful bully accused of multiple sexual offenses, who once ran a scammy university. After all, look at who they put in the White House.
This piece on the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech:
The immigration agents who detained Mr. Khalil told him his student visa had been revoked, Ms. Greer said, even though he does not currently hold such a visa. Revoking a green card is quite rare, said Elora Mukherjee, the director of the immigrants’ rights clinic at Columbia Law School, and in a vast majority of cases where it does happen, the holder has been accused and convicted of criminal offenses, she said.
This excerpt from Kara Swisher’s new book on the promise and then souring of Silicon Valley:
What is happening is shocking, in a way. But if anyone is not surprised, it’s tech reporters who saw, over the past decade, what these people were becoming. Musk’s behavior is emblematic of tech’s most heinous figures, who now feel emboldened to enter the analog world with the same lack of care and arrogance with which they built their sloppy platforms. They denigrate media, science, activism, and culture, and spend their time bellyaching about the “woke-mind virus” and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Those programs, despite their occasional annoyances, were directionally correct. As I often point out, the opposite of woke is asleep; the opposite of DEI is homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. That’s just the way an increasing number of techies want it and, with Trump and Musk at the wheel, the goal toward which they are now reengineering our country.
What I’m thinking about
Coffee, and not much else right now.
Until next time,
Yasmeen