Oscar win brings hope to Palestinians in Masafer Yatta

Just last week, Israeli troops tore down a Palestinian family’s shed in Masafer Yatta, a remote, hilly corner at the southern edge of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

It was the latest instance of destruction targeting a collection of hamlets whose population is threatened with expulsion.

Over the weekend, Masafer Yatta residents cheered the Oscar win of a documentary, No Other Land, which depicts life in the beleaguered community, and hoped it would bring them some help.

No Other Land follows Palestinian activist Basel Adra, as he risks arrest to document the destruction of Masafer Yatta West Bank, joined by his co-director, Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham.

The joint Palestinian-Israeli production has won a string of international awards, starting at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024. Five years in the making, it gained greater resonance amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, as well as increasing raids in the West Bank that have caused the displacement of tens of thousands of Palestinians.

In al-Tuwaneh, one of the hamlets that make up Masafer Yatta, Salem Adra said his family stayed up all night for the Oscar ceremony. They watched as his older brother, Basel, the film’s co-director, came on stage to accept the award for the best documentary.

“It was such a huge surprise, such joy,” he said.

Salem said he hoped the Oscar win “opens the world’s eyes to what’s happening here in Masafer Yatta”.

“It’s a win for all of Palestine and for everyone who lives in Masafer Yatta,” he said.

Since the film was first released, he said, threats and pressure against his family have increased. Their car has been stoned by the settlers. After the movie won an award at the Berlin International Film Festival a year ago, the military returned over and over to the family, and once detained his father, searching his phone and asking: “Why are you filming?”

The Israeli military designated Masafer Yatta as a live-fire training zone in the 1980s and ordered residents, mostly Arab Bedouin, to be expelled. Israel said the Bedouin did not have permanent structures in the area. But families say they have lived and herded their sheep and goats across the area long before Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war.

After a 20-year legal battle by residents, Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the expulsion order in 2022. But about 1,000 residents have largely remained in place, as Israeli troops regularly demolish homes, tents, water tanks and olive orchards.

Palestinians fear outright expulsion could come at any time.

In his acceptance speech on Sunday night, Basel called on the world “to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people”.

He said he hoped his newborn daughter would “not have to live the same life I am living now … Always feeling settler violence, home demolitions and forceful displacement.”