In a segment that aired on the March 3 edition of the CBC radio program The Current, host Matt Galloway re-broadcast his December interview of Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham, two of the directors of “No Other Land”, a documentary that recently won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Galloway opened the segment by saying that: “Since 1981 the community of Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank, has been under an evacuation and demolition order. The Israeli military designated the area as a firing zone. The issue is that Palestinians live there. The documentary, ‘No Other Land’ is a portrait of this community’s struggles to save its homes and its land.”
Click below to listen to the full segment:
Adra went on to say of Israel that they: “colonized our land by building settlements and for building the settlements and military bases Israel always looked for how to legitimize this to their own laws, designating Masafer Yatta as a firing zone.”
Abraham added: “As long as the Palestinian people are not free, my people, the Israeli people will not be safe and will never be at home. You can’t control millions of people, place them under a system where they are constantly dominated by the military, where they keep on losing their lands and being pushed out of their lands year after year after year for decades.”
Adra, and Abraham together present a hardline anti-Israel view of events in Masafer Yatta. Galloway is entitled to showcase all opinions on his program, however, journalistic ethics dictate that the opposing view is also represented, though this is a rarity on his program.
The Current omitted that Masafer Yatta has actually been the subject of a 22-year-long court case culminating in a 2022 Israeli High Court ruling that determined that the Arabs were not living permanently in the area.
As Naomi Kahn of the Israeli non-profit Regavim, pointed out: “the recent High Court decision lists some of the more egregious examples that prove unequivocally that the residents of the illegal ‘villages’ of Masafer Yatta arrived after the IDF closed off the area for military use. It also proves that these residents, almost without exception, have permanent homes in the nearby town of Yatta.”
Given this court ruling, the structures in Masafer Yatta are unauthorized and therefore can legally be evicted and demolished.
Yet Galloway didn’t mention the court case, nor did he challenge the depiction of Israel as committing wanton and cruel violence.
Abraham built on this narrative, advocating for a two-state solution, saying that Israel
needs to “move to a place where the Palestinians are free from occupation and foreign control and supremacy and both the Israelis and the Palestinians can have rights and self-determination and statehood.”
Galloway did not remind listeners that most of Palestinian society does not accept Israel’s right to exist at all.
Abraham further claimed that “we are unable to stop the starvation of Gaza… we are unable to stop… the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.”
Abraham’s allegation of starvation is bizarre, given that Gaza’s population has grown during the war, and the accusation has been debunked due to its inaccurate data, as well as by Gazan’s own social media reporting of plentiful food availability.
The credibility of the directors is also in question following the release of video footage allegedly showing co-director Basel Adra setting fire to Palestinian structures, while yelling “the Jews did it.”
This is the twelfth segment on The Current in the past 12 months featuring voices critical of Israel with no opposing opinions. It deletes Israel’s perspective from view, presenting one of the most difficult geopolitical situations of our time as having only one narrative. In so doing, this CBC program stands in violation of the CBC’s Journalistic Standards and Practices which calls for fair, accurate and balanced reporting.
